‘No: Old Christmas Day comes on a Saturday.’
The perturbed little brain had reckoned wrong. ‘Well, it must be a Friday,’ she murmured in a reverie.
‘No: have it altered, of course,’ said Miss Aldclyffe cheerfully. ‘There’s nothing bad in Friday, but such a creature as you will be thinking about its being unlucky—in fact, I wouldn’t choose a Friday myself to be married on, since all the other days are equally available.’
‘I shall not have it altered,’ said Cytherea firmly; ‘it has been altered once already: I shall let it be.’
XIII. THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY
1. THE FIFTH OF JANUARY. BEFORE DAWN
We pass over the intervening weeks. The time of the story is thus advanced more than a quarter of a year.
On the midnight preceding the morning which would make her the wife of a man whose presence fascinated her into involuntariness of bearing, and whom in absence she almost dreaded, Cytherea lay in her little bed, vainly endeavouring to sleep.
She had been looking back amid the years of her short though varied past, and thinking of the threshold upon which she stood. Days and months had dimmed the form of Edward Springrove like the gauzes of a vanishing stage-scene, but his dying voice could still be heard faintly behind. That a soft small chord in her still vibrated true to his memory, she would not admit: that she did not approach Manston with feelings which could by any stretch of words be called hymeneal, she calmly owned.