Page:Rilla of Ingleside (1921).djvu/232

 bountiful that you would have thought it was the product of a month’s labor. Everybody had brought something. Mrs. Dead Angus had brought a large apple pie, which she placed on a chair in the dining room and then absently sat down on it. Neither her temper nor her black silk wedding garment was improved thereby, but the pie was never missed at the gay bridal feast. Mrs. Dead Angus eventually took it home with her again. Whiskers-on-the-moon’s pacifist pig should not get it, anyhow.

That evening Mr. and Mrs. Joe, accompanied by the recovered Sir Wilfrid, departed for the Four Winds lighthouse, which was kept by Joe’s uncle and in which they meant to spend their brief honeymoon. Una Meredith and Rilla and Susan washed the dishes, tidied up, left a cold supper and Miranda’s pitiful little note on the table for Mr. Pryor, and walked home, while the mystic veil of dreamy, haunted winter twilight wrapped itself over the Glen.

“I would really not have minded being a war-bride myself,” remarked Susan sentimentally.

But Rilla felt rather flat—perhaps as a reaction to all the excitement and rush of the past thirty-six hours. She was disappointed somehow—the whole affair had been so ludicrous, and Miranda and Joe so lachrymose and commonplace.

“If Miranda hadn’t given that wretched dog such an enormous dinner he wouldn’t have had that fit,” she said crossly. “I warned her—but she said she couldn’t starve the poor dog—he would soon be all she had left, etc. I could have shaken her.”

“The best man was more excited than Joe was,” said Susan. “He wished Miranda many happy re-