"It was a pretty weddin', wasn't it?" said Mrs. Williams, "And I never saw a happier lookin' couple than Anna Belle and Henry. Most brides and grooms look more like scared rabbits than anything else, but Anna Belle and Henry were so happy they actually forgot to be scared. I reckon they think that married life's a smooth, straight road with flowers on both sides, just like that garden path. You and me have been over it, and we know better." "They'll have their trials," smiled Mrs. Martin, "but if they love each other, they can stand whatever comes." "Yes," agreed Mrs. Williams, "love's like a rubber tire; it softens the jolts and carries you easy over the rough places in the road." "Henry was the image of his father," said Mrs. Martin dreamily. "I couldn't help thinkin' of myself when I looked at Anna Belle," said Mrs. Williams. "You may not believe it, but I was as slim as Anna Belle, when I was her age." "I wish their fathers could have seen them," sighed Mrs. Martin. Mrs. Williams leaned toward her companion. "Maybe they did," she said in a half whisper. "I'm no believer in table-walkin' and such as that, but many a time I've felt the dead just as near me as you are, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Henry's father and Anna Belle's father were at the weddin'." "Every weddin' makes you think of your own weddin'," said Mrs. Martin timidly. "So it does," assured Mrs. Williams, "and I was married just such a day as this. We'd set the fifteenth of May for our weddin', but Aunt Martha McDavid said May was an unlucky month, and so we changed it to the first of June." "I was married in the fall," said Mrs. Martin placidly. "I remember one of my dresses was a plaid silk, green and brown and yellow, and the first time I put it on, Henry's father went out in the yard and pulled some leaves off the sugar maples, and laid 'em on my lap, and said they matched the colors of my dress. I pressed the leaves, and they're in my Bible to this day." "I had a dark blue silk with a black satin stripe runnin' through it," confided Mrs. Williams, "and after I got through wearin' it, I lined a quilt with it, and it's on Anna Belle's bed now." The two women were rocking gently to and fro; both were smiling faintly, and there was a retrospective look in their eyes. Memory, like a questing dove, was flying between the past and the present, bringing back now a leaf and now a flower plucked from the shores of old romance, and they were no longer the middle-aged mothers of married children, but young brides with life before them; and as they talked, more to themselves than to each other, with long intervals of silence, the afternoon waned, the sun was low, and the little garden lay in shadow. "What a long day this has been!" exclaimed Mrs. Williams, rousing herself from a reverie. "Why, it seems to me I've lived a hundred years since I got up this mornin'."