"Going to _school_!" cried little Mary Kuhns, who was now Mrs. Weimer. "Going to school when we are of an age and I have two children!" "But I am not so fortunate as you, Mary," answered Katy. Katy spoke with the ease of the preacher or the doctor; she seemed older than all her contemporaries. "Going to school!" cried Susannah Kuhns. "You will surely be an old maid, Katy!" "There are worse things to be," said Katy. "Going to school!" Bevy's outcry was the loudest of all. "_Now! Are_ you crazy, Katy?" "Yes," laughed Katy as of old. "Do you remember what learning you had?" "Yes, indeed!" "Pooh! I forget this long time everything I learned in school. It was mostly A, B, C, I guess. But there are better things than learning. I can cook. Was that why you went so often to the preacher this summer? Were you studying again?" "Exactly," said Katy. Bevy looked at her half in admiration, half in disapproval. Katy had reached her full height; her dresses almost touched the floor; her curly braid was coiled on the top of her head; her eyes had darkened. But Katy's mouth smiled as it had smiled when she was a little girl. Bevy felt dimly that here was a different person from Mary Weimer with her babies and Louisa Kuhns, who, married a month, came to the store without having curled her hair. "But you ought to get married sometime, Katy!" exploded Bevy. The wild dream which Bevy had cherished for her darling had faded. "What will you do in this world all alone?" Presently Katy's new dresses were finished, her work with the preacher was concluded, and her new trunk was sent out from the county seat. Edwin's Sally and little Adam wept daily. Edwin shook his head solemnly over the impending separation. In the few days which remained before her departure, the affairs of David Hartman and the Koehlers and the prospective apple-butter boilings were entirely forgotten. The gifts of friends who came to say good-bye would have filled two trunks, if Aunt Sally had not wisely discriminated between them. "What will you do with three woolen quilts, Katy, when I gave you already nice blankets? These we will put in a chest in the garret. It will go for your Haus Steir [wedding outfit]." Susannah Kuhns brought two jars of peaches and a glass or two of jelly, being firmly of the conviction that boarding-schools and colleges were especially constructed for the starving of the young. "The English people do not eat anyhow like we do. I was once to some English people in Allentown and they had no spread at all for on their bread. Now you will have spreads, Katy." Finally even Alvin Koehler caught the spirit and brought a present for Katy, a tie from his store. Alvin allowed no cloudy recollections of the past to darken his sunshine. Sarah Ann came, too, with a silk quilt and a silk sofa pillow of the "Log Cabin" pattern, the product of long saving of brightly colored scraps.