Halfway to the station Hugh Mavor met the dog-cart returning, the groom alone seated in it. There had been an accident, he said; a couple of carriages had run off the line and overturned. He had waited for the surviving passengers to be brought in. The train bringing them had at length arrived; Mr Marston was not among them.
The accident had happened ten miles down the line. Hugh got into the dog-cart and drove to the scene of the disaster.
Mrs Mavor spent the night in Daphne's room. I awaited Hugh, sitting alone by the drawing-room fire, when he returned at four o'clock in the morning of what was to have been his sister's wedding-day. He came in, carrying a florist's tin box in his hand, and I read the news in his face before he spoke.
"Only three killed. He was one. I saw him. I thought I had to. It was awful."
He sank into the chair where Daphne had sat, hid his face on its back as she had done, while his shoulders heaved with painful sobbing. After a few minutes he turned to me.
"We shall have to tell her," he said. "That is the next thing to do."
He got up, and with shaking fingers, not knowing, I think, that he did so, pulled the string from the tin box, which lay on the table beneath the lamp, pulled it open.
"Everything else in the carriage seemed to be in shivers—but this," he said.
Inside, beneath the snowy wrappings of cotton wool, great perfect blooms of pink carnations lay. The spicy fragrance rose in our faces; in the light of the lamp the glowing flowers smiled in their faultless beauty.
"Poor Dapple's lucky flowers!" the boy said.