Not a word had she said about the wedding.
Cowardly? Yes, indeed! But if a prisoner were given a bottle of champagne to drink just before his death by hanging, it's odds on that instead of merely tasting a few drops he would drink the whole bottle, and go to his doom with the exultant thought of something nice, anyway, having happened to cheer him on his final exit.
She simply radiated love, and allowed neither the frequent upbraidings of her distracted aunt, nor the hourly approach of the fatal day to dim the sunlight of the hour in hand.
"Never you worry," she said one day, when her aunt had waylaid and implored her to have her wedding-dress fitted, "We'll pin it with safety-pins if it doesn't hang right, and as long as I'm at the church door on time, nothing else really matters. And I've given you my word on that."
And she had vaulted the wall and taken a short cut through the golf course until she had come up behind the man who loved her; and he, reading the trouble in her strange eyes, had drawn her hands to his heart and held them tight.
How often had they stood in the shade of the fir trees in the heat of the day, with the intoxicating smell of the pines in their nostrils, and the soothing sound of the humming of many bees in their ears.
They had stood so still, so close, and so very much alone.
Oh! he loved her and her ways!
Loved the rarity of her beauty, and the vitality of her body, loved the extreme care she took not to allow her fingers to touch his when passing a cup or a hefty sandwich.
Revelled in the surge of colour which swept her face when sometimes he caught and steadied her on a rock; and the way in which, when sitting on the sand, she would suddenly scrunch up her knees with her arms for no apparent reason, and bury her scarlet mouth, and the eyes which betrayed her, in the rough tweed of her skirt.