So, presently, she found herself explaining to him that it had always been one of her beliefs from the time of her earliest knowledge of such things, that one couldn't properly be a bride without a certain ceremony of preparation. The filling of a dower chest was one part of it, and the setting of infinite stitches, each as perfect as a tiny pearl, in much "fair and broidered raiment" was another. The princesses in the fairy tales did their fine needlework to the accompaniment of songs upon a lute; so one set stitches in one's wedding garments, to the romance of fancies--and so--
She did not finish coherently, but Phil laughed and said teasingly that he ought to have known that any one, who, as a child, wept to wear her rosebud sash out walking on the desert, where there were only owls and jack-rabbits to see it, would insist on veils and trails and things at a time like this. He wouldn't wait for the filling of a dower chest. She could do that afterward; but he was finally induced to wait for the other things, when Mrs. Blythe was brought into the discussion and pronounced them actually necessary.
He went back to Louisville without telling Mary of his arrangement with Mr. Sherman which had changed all his plans. The home he had written so much about would be ready for her, but it would not be in the far West, as she expected. He could hardly wait for the day to come when he could witness her delight over the tremendous surprise which he had in store for her.
It was not many weeks before he had the pleasure of telling her, but it was over two months before she made a record of it in her diary. Then she wrote:
"There is room for just one more chapter in my Good Times book, and when that is finished it is to be laid away in the chest with my wedding gown and bridal roses. Maybe, a hundred years from now, some young girl rummaging through the attic may find my beautiful dress all yellowed with time, and the rose leaves dried and scentless. But I am sure my happiness will call to her from these pages like a living voice as young as hers.
"And when she sees how this record is blistered with tears in places, and reads how Disappointment and Duty and even Death rose up to 'close all the roads of all the world' to me, then she'll take 'heart of grace' if she is in any desert of waiting herself. For she'll see how true it is that Love's road is always open, and that if we only keep inflexible it will finally lead to the land of our desire. For here I am at last in Lloydsboro Valley.