Mary Ann squeezed her hand, kissed her, blushed and giggled herself out of the way of the next comer.
They went out to the dining room and sat around the long table. It was Marcia's timid hand that cut the bridecake, and all the room full watched her. Seeing the pretty color come and go in her excited cheeks, they wondered that they had never noticed before how beautiful Marcia was growing. A handsome couple they would make! And they looked from Marcia to David and back again, wondering and trying to fathom the mystery.
It was gradually stealing about the company, the truth about Kate and Captain Leavenworth. The minister had told it in his sad and gentle way. Just the facts. No gossip. Naturally every one was bristling with questions, but not much could be got from the minister.
"I really do not know," he would say in his courteous, old-worldly way, and few dared ask further. Perhaps the minister, wise by reason of much experience, had taken care to ask as few questions as possible himself, and not to know too much before undertaking this task for his old friend the Squire.
And so Kate's marriage went into the annals of the village, at least so far as that morning was concerned, quietly, and with little exclamation before the family. The Squire and his wife controlled their faces wonderfully. There was an austerity about the Squire as he talked with his friends that was new to his pleasant face, but Madam conversed with her usual placid self-poise, and never gave cause for conjecture as to her true feelings.
There were some who dared to offer their surprised condolences. To such the stepmother replied that of course the outcome of events had been a sore trial to the Squire, and all of them, but they were delighted at the happy arrangement that had been made. She glanced contentedly toward the child-bride.
It was a revelation to the whole village that Marcia had grown up and was so handsome.
Dismay filled the breasts of the village gossips. They had been defrauded. Here was a fine scandal which they had failed to discover in time and spread abroad in its due course.
Everybody was shy of speaking to the bride. She sat in her lovely finery like some wild rose caught as a sacrifice. Yet every one admitted that she might have done far worse. David was a good man, with prospects far beyond most young men of his time. Moreover he was known to have a brilliant mind, and the career he had chosen, that of journalism, in which he was already making his mark, was one that promised to be lucrative as well as influential.