One reason why it was impossible to compare the two cases was a perfectly clear one, to the thinking of Miss Fossett's innermost heart. But she kept it tight locked up there.
In the old days, when all her forecasts of life took her own practical exclusion from it for granted, and wrote celibacy large on every page of her record-volume, her great dream had been to unite her beloved friend Bessy Caldecott to that dearest of all possible young fellows, her brother Gus's friend Athelstan. Adeline was a little prone to playing at Providence, and—don't you see?—Bessy was so good and sound, and so much better altogether than that showy little sister of hers. So, what wonder, when Athelstan led the family minx, Sophy, to the altar, that Adeline rather than otherwise wished that the earth would open and swallow the altar? She would have resented the idea that any personal feeling entered into the matter.
Even so in these new days, with all this change, she could and did believe that she could see her old girl friend the wife of her old boy friend, without any feeling but sheer rejoicing that Yorick had married the right sister after all. And this feeling entered strangely into her real views on the Deceased Wife's Sister question. Catechized closely, she might have confessed to a belief in real wives, with a sub-creed that marriage with a sister of one was somehow a worse desecration of a sacrament than marriage with a second cousin, for instance, or a mere female undefined. There was no evidence to show that Challis hadn't married the right sister first. If he hadn't, of course the "living in Sin" business had come off in the first act of his drama, and nothing was needed but an Act of Parliament to qualify the parties to live in purity, ungrundied.
At any rate, those were the lines on which Miss Fossett would have justified her friend's defiance of his Bishop. And when Yorick had referred to that other way of solving his problem—marriage with the female undefined—she had shut any hint of that female being defined as herself into the very core of her heart with a snap.
[CHAPTER XLIII]
CHALLIS'S VISIT TO THE RECTORY. A VISIT TO JIM AT THE WELL. HOW LIZARANN WAS AT THE SEASIDE. ST. AUGUSTIN'S SUMMER. HOW THEY MET SALADIN. HOW CHALLIS TOLD ALL
"Have him down here if you like, Athel," said Miss Caldecott to her brother-in-law on the first of August, a little over three months later. "I shall be in London with Phœbe and Joan. So it can't matter to me. Only I think he ought to be on honour."
"How do you mean, aunty?"