"I'm sorry for the lasses' disappointment, wife, but they can't go. It would be madness to think of it. The phaeton would be broken to bits, if the grey mare could do the distance, in such weather, which she couldn't; and if we were to send into Winton to ask, there's not one of the inns would let a chaise go out of the yard after last night's fall of snow."
For two or three minutes there was a blank silence round the breakfast table; Anne's eyes grew tearfully bright, Sophy looked rebellious, and I began to experience a painful difficulty in swallowing as I stared out of the window at the hopeless prospect of a great drift, which levelled the garden hedge with the fields beyond, and went sloping up in a snowy undulation to the brow of the Langhill.
"If a phaeton can't pull through the snow, how will Cousin Mary get to church to be married?" proposed Sophy.
"She'll ride as your father and mother did on the same occasion, Miss."
"I wore a plum-coloured cloth habit, faced with velvet, and sugar-loaf buttons, and a hat with a gold band on it," said Mrs. Preston. "I believe, father, it was a morning to the full as bad as this, was our wedding; and yet didn't all the folks come over from Appley Moor? To be sure they did, every one of them!"
"And the road from Appley Moor to Rookwood Grange is worse than the road we should have to go, isn't it, mother?" insinuated Sophy.
"Couldn't be worse than Binks' Wold," replied her father; and to spare himself any further aggravation from our faces of reproach and mortification, he marched away, after his ample breakfast, out of the room, and out of the house. Mrs. Preston disappeared also, and we three young ones were left alone to bewail our disappointment.
And a cruel disappointment it was; perhaps more cruel to me than to my school-friends, for I was a town-bred girl, only staying my Christmas holidays at Ripstone Farm, and never in my life had I been to any entertainment more exciting than a breaking-up dance all of girls. The wedding at the Grange was known of before I came, and so I had been sent from home provided with crisp white muslin, tucked ever so high, with rose-coloured bows and sash; and only the Saturday previous, Anne's and Sophy's new frocks had come from the dressmaker's, by the Winton carrier, and had been pronounced, with their sky-blue trimmings, so pretty, so sweetly pretty! When Mr. Preston had said we could not go to the wedding-party, my first thought had been of my frock, and when we came to compare notes, Anne's and Sophy's regrets proved to have taken the same direction. With one consent we adjourned up-stairs, to indulge the luxury of woe over our sacrificed finery, but that mournful exercise palling upon us fast, Sophy and I found our way, by a swept foot-path, into the garden, where the two boys of the family were constructing a snow-man of grand proportions. Shovels were proposed to us to help, and
