The court-house was finished, even to the last touches of putting on the brass locks and window-fastenings. The commissioners formerly accepted the building as meeting with all the contracted requirements, and a large check was handed to Cavanaugh by the Ordinary of the county. Cavanaugh was in high feather for several reasons, the main one being that the whole affair was to be capped by a wedding at the farm-house. Cavanaugh had been expecting his wife to come up, but had a letter saying that she was actually in bed with rheumatism and unable to make the journey. Only the most intimate friends and relatives of the family were invited, and on the evening of the wedding they began to arrive shortly after sunset in buggies, wagons, and on horseback. Cavanaugh, who had dubbed himself as "the best man," was the busiest person about the house. He met all the guests, showed them where to put their horses and where to sit in the parlor, which was filled with a motley collection of borrowed chairs from cherry-colored rockers of the latest tawdry design to straight-backed, unpainted relics of Cherokee days with concave, split-oak or rawhide bottoms. With his usual stinginess and contempt of show, Whaley had allowed his daughter little for her trousseau, and her apparel was most simple, and so scant that her small trunk was scarcely filled. As they were to take a train immediately after the wedding supper, she wore a plain traveling-dress of dark gray which made her look as demure as a young Quakeress. As for John, he had considered his new suit as good enough and under Cavanaugh's advice had not bought another. "I'll tell you one thing you've got to do," Cavanaugh said to him as he was tying John's cravat in John's room before the ceremony, "you've just got to stand up straighter. Here lately, when you are with Tilly, you hump yourself over, or sag down with one leg crooked like you was ashamed of being tall. If there is a time in a fellow's life when he ought to stand straight and look folks square in the eyes it is when he's having the cheek to take to himself a sweet young bride. Stand up, throw your shoulders back, and let them all know that you've got a job before you and that you are going to do your level best to put it through." "Give me a danger-sign if you see me making any breaks," John smiled. "I do feel shaky and weak-kneed and I might have folded up like a pocket-rule if you hadn't cautioned me." John went down and mingled with the guests before Tilly joined them. He was near the door when Martha Jane Eperson came in, accompanied by her mother, who went at once to a seat proffered by Cavanaugh, leaving her daughter with John, to whom she had barely nodded. "You must excuse my mother," Martha Jane said, plaintively, as she shook hands with John. "She is very unhappy over the way Joel is taking it. He simply could not come to-night." "I understand, and I am awfully sorry," John contrived to say.