Mrs. Clephane brushed aside the possible cousin from Meridia. “Fred shall take me up,” she declared; and Anne’s smile lost its nervous edge.
“Now, is there anything else left to settle?” the girl gaily challenged her aunt; and Mrs. Drover groaned back: “Anything else? But it seems as if we’d only just begun. If it weren’t for Nollie and Lilla I shouldn’t feel sure of anybody’s being at the church when the time comes....”
The time had almost come: the sun had risen on the day before the wedding. It rose, mounted up in a serene heaven, bent its golden arch over an untroubled indifferent world, and stooped westward in splendid unawareness. The day, so full of outward bustle, of bell-ringing, telephone calls, rushings back and forth of friends, satellites and servants, had drooped to its close in the unnatural emptiness of such conclusions. Everything was done; every question was settled; every last order given; and Anne, with a kiss for her mother, had gone off with Nollie and Joe Tresselton for one of the crepuscular motor-dashes that clear the cobwebs from modern brains.
Anne had resolutely refused to have either bridesmaids or the conventional family dinner of the bridal eve. She wanted to strip the occasion of all its meaningless formalities, and Chris Fenno was of the same mind. He was to spend the evening alone with his parents at their hotel, and Anne had invited no one but Fred Landers to dine. She had warned her mother that she might be a little late in getting home, and had asked her, in view of Mr. Landers’s excessive punctuality, to be downstairs in time to receive and pacify him.
Mrs. Clephane had seen through the simple manœuvre, and had not resented it. After all, it would be the best opportunity to tell Fred Landers what she had decided to tell him. As she sat by the drawing-room fire listening for the door-bell she felt a curious sense of aloofness, almost of pacification. It might be only the quiet of exhaustion; she half-suspected it was, but she was too exhausted to feel sure. Yet one thing was clear to her; she had suffered less savagely since she had known that Dr. Arklow had guessed what she was suffering. The problem had been almost too difficult for him; but it was enough that he had perceived its difficulty, had seen that it was too deeply rooted in living fibres to be torn out without mortal hurt.
“Sterile pain ... I should never want any one to be the cause of sterile pain....” That phrase of his helped her even now; her mind clung fast to it as she sat waiting for Landers’s ring.
It came punctually, even sooner than the hour, as Anne had foreseen; and in another moment he was advancing across the room in his slow bulky way, with excuses for his early arrival.
“But I did it on purpose. I was sure Anne would be late—”
“Anne! She isn’t even in—”