Shaken with pain and horror as he was, he could still give thanks for two things: Kean had never guessed that his wife knew and had gone to his grave believing that the crime he had committed for her sake had not been in vain, and Sybil had died in ignorance of her first husband’s tragic survival.
Chapter XXVII
On one of those perfect July days which are occasionally vouchsafed to the inhabitants of the British Isles Cynthia Bell and John Leslie were married.
They had chosen an old church, tucked away in an unfashionable corner of South London, as the scene of their wedding and had asked to the ceremony only those whose friendship they really valued.
Lady Galston had flatly refused to sanction the marriage or to be present at it, but Cynthia’s father had, once more, asserted himself and had brought his daughter to London and insisted on giving her away himself.
“A good thing Lady Galston has taken that line,” was the comment of that other woman who had mothered Cynthia so efficiently in her time of trouble, as she and Hatter Fayre drove together from the church to the Staveleys’ house in Eaton Square which they had insisted on lending for the occasion.
“She’s never been an atom of good to that child since the day she was born and, in her present mood, she’d cast a blight over a Bacchanalian orgy!”
They found Cynthia and Leslie in the hall on their arrival and it certainly did not seem as if Lady Galston’s antagonism had served to dim the girl’s radiance on this, the happiest day of her life.
She stood, her arm through Leslie’s, talking to old Mrs. Doggett and surrounded by a shy, beaming crowd of Galston retainers who had come of their own accord all the way from Cumberland to see her married. Fayre, looking round, recognized the Gunnets and, with them, his own special protégé, Albert Small, late tramp, now boot-boy, dog-washer, bicycle-cleaner, etc., at Fayre’s newly acquired cottage in Surrey. He was resplendent in an old suit of his master’s and looked a very different being from the furtive and defiant tatterdemalion who had slept in John Leslie’s barn on the fatal night of March 23rd.
At the sight of Fayre and his companion, Cynthia gave a little cry of pleasure and came forward eagerly to greet them.