Everything was done at last. The baked tomatoes were browned just right; the corn pudding was white, and creamy, and sweet; the custard was delicious, and the coffee sent a fragrant odor through the house; but the guests did not come. She had rung the bell, and blown the horn, and at last, as the clock struck one, she started herself for the delinquents, exclaiming when she saw them, “Well, you are smart!” but ere she got farther, Roy arose, and taking Edna’s hand in his, said to her: “I have found her, you see, and she has promised to live with me always. She is to be my wife, if you do not object.” “Umph! a pretty time of day to ask if I object, after it’s all cut and dried, and dinner spoiling in the oven. Didn’t you hear the bell, nor the horn I blew an hour ago?” Both culprits pleaded guilty, and both made haste to follow Miss Jerusha, who never spoke again until the house was reached, and contrary to her prediction, she found that the pot-pie was not spoiled, though she insisted that it would have been better half an hour before. By the time dinner was over, Aunt Jerry was completely mollified, and after her dishes were washed and put away, and her floor swept, and the cat fed, and the horse watered again, she was ready to hear Roy on the subject uppermost in his mind. He loved Edna; he wanted her for his wife; and wanted to know if Miss Pepper had any objections to the match. “It’s most too late to give them, if I have,” Aunt Jerry said. “But that’s the way nowadays. Young folks have got the whip row of us, and will keep it, I suppose. No, I have no objections. If she must marry, and I suppose she must, I’d as soon she’d have you as anybody, and she won’t go to you poverty-stricken either. Every dollar she paid me, I put in Beals’s bank, in her name, and added another to it, so that she has now as good as a thousand laid up. I shall give her another thousand, too, and a feather bed, and I want it secured to her and her heirs forever.” “Oh, auntie, how kind you have been to me, when I thought, sometimes, you did not care,” Edna said. The money in the bank was new to her, and she felt the tears rush into her eyes as she thought how she had misjudged her aunt. As for Roy, he could scarcely repress a smile at the woman’s eagerness to have the two thousand dollars settled on Edna beyond his reach, but he promised to see that it was done, and then said it was also his intention to give his bride, out and out, such a sum as would make her independent in case of his dying insolvent, a catastrophe by the way, which he did not anticipate. When he asked for an early day, and named Christmas as the time when he hoped Edna would come to him, Aunt Jerry demurred. “It was not decent,” she said, “and did not show proper respect for that dead woman with the boy’s name.”