Her mother's hard gipsy eyes watched only for delinquencies, and her rating tongue was actually a relief to Dinah after the dread solitude of those long hours. She was like a prisoner awaiting execution, and even that harsh companionship was in a measure helpful to her.
The time passed with appalling swiftness. When the luncheon hour arrived she was horrified to find that the morning had gone. She could eat nothing, a fact which raised a jeering laugh from her mother and a chaffing remonstrance from her father. Billy had gone riding on Rupert and had not returned. Billy always came and went exactly as he pleased.
One or two more presents from friends of her father's had arrived by the midday post. Mrs. Bathurst unpacked them, admiring them with more than a touch of envy, assuring Dinah that she was a very lucky girl, luckier than she deserved to be; but Dinah, though she acquiesced, had no heart for presents. She could only see—as she had seen all through the night—the piteous, marred face of a woman who had passed through such an intensity of suffering as she could only dimly guess at into the dark of utter despair. She could only hear, whichever way she turned, the clanking of the chains that in so brief a time were to be welded irrevocably about herself.
Luncheon over, she went up to dress and to finish the packing of the new trunks which were to accompany her upon her honeymoon. She had not even yet begun to realize these strange belongings of hers. She could no longer visualize herself as a bride. She looked upon all the finery as destined for another, possibly Rose de Vigne, but emphatically not for herself.
The wedding-dress and veil lying in their box, swathed in tissue-paper, had a gossamer unreality about them that even the sense of touch could not dispel. No—no! The bride of to-morrow was surely, surely, not herself!
They were to spend the first part of their honeymoon at a little place on the Cornish coast, very far from everywhere, as Sir Eustace said. She thought of that little place with a vague wonder. It was the stepping-stone between the life she now knew and that new unknown life that awaited her. She would go there just Dinah—work-a-day Dinah—her own ordinary self. She would leave a fortnight after, possibly less, a totally different being—a married woman, Lady Studley, part and parcel of Sir Eustace's train, his most intimate belonging, most exclusively his own.
She trembled afresh as this thought came home to her. Despite his assurances, marriage seemed to her a terrible thing. It was like parting, not only with the old life, but with herself.
She dressed mechanically, scarcely thinking of her appearance, roused only at length from her pre-occupation by the tread of hoofs under her window. She leaned forth quickly and discerned Scott on horseback,—a trim, upright figure, very confident in the saddle—and with him Billy still mounted on Rupert and evidently in the highest spirits.
The latter spied her at once and accosted her in his cracked, cheerful voice. "Hi, Dinah! Come down! We're going to tea at the Court. Scott will walk with you, and I'm going to ride his gee."
He rolled off Rupert with the words. Scott looked up at her, faintly smiling as he lifted his hat. "I hope that plan will suit you," he said. "The fact is the padre has been detained and can't get here before tea-time. So we thought—Eustace thought—you wouldn't mind coming up to the Court to tea instead of waiting to see him here."