The day will come

LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
THE DAY WILL COME.
“Farewell, too—now at last—
Farewell, fair lily.”
The joy-bells clashed out upon the clear, bright air, startling the rooks in the elm-trees that showed their leafy tops above the grey gables of the old church. The bells broke out with sudden jubilation; sudden, albeit the village had been on the alert for that very sound all the summer afternoon, uncertain as to when the signal for that joy peal might be given.
The signal had come now, given by the telegraph wires to the old postmistress, and sent on to the expectant ringers in the church tower. The young couple had arrived at Wareham station, five miles off; and four horses were bringing them to their honeymoon home yonder amidst the old woods of Cheriton Chase.
Cheriton village had been on tiptoe with expectancy ever since four o’clock, although common sense ought to have informed the villagers that a bride and bridegroom who were to be married at two o’clock in Westminster Abbey were not very likely to appear at Cheriton early in the afternoon. But the village having made up its mind to a half-holiday was glad to begin early. A little knot of gipsies from the last race-meeting in the neighbourhood had improved the occasion and set up the friendly and familiar image of Aunt Sally on the green in front of the Eagle Inn; while a rival establishment had started a pictorial shooting-gallery, with a rubicund giant’s face and wide-open mouth, grinning at the populace across a barrel of Barcelona nuts. There are some people who might think Cheriton village and Cheriton Chase too remote from the busy world and its traffic to be subject to strong emotions of any kind. Yet even in this region of Purbeck, cut off from the rest of England by a winding river, and ostentatiously calling itself an island, there were eager interests and warm feelings, and many a link with the great world of men and women on the other side of the stream.