"That has nothing whatever to do with it. What you've got to do is to make—up—your—mind." These last four words are very staccato indeed. Tishy recovers a dignity she has rather been allowing to lapse.
"By the time you're my age, Sally dear, you'll see there are ways and ways of looking at things. Everything can't be wrapped up in a nutshell. We're not Ancient Phœnicians nowadays, whatever papa may say. But you're a dear, impulsive little puss."
The protest was feeble in form and substance, and quite unworthy of Miss Sales Wilson, the daughter of the Professor Sales Wilson. No wonder Sally briefly responded, "Stuff and nonsense!" and presently went home.
Of course, the outer circle of Mrs. Nightingale's society (for in this matter we are all like Regents Park) had their say about her
proposed marriage. But they don't come into our story; and besides, they had too few data for their opinions to be of any value. What a difference it would have made if old Major Roper had met Fenwick and recalled the face of the dead shot who, it seemed, had somehow ceded his tiger-skin to him. But no such thing happened, nor did anything else come about either to revive the story of the divorce or to throw a light on the identity of Palliser and Fenwick. Eight weeks after the latter (or the former?) had for the second time disclosed his passion to the same woman, the couple were married at the church of St. Satisfax, and, having started for the Continent the same afternoon, found themselves, quite unreasonably happy, wandering about in France with hardly a thought beyond the day at most, so long as a letter came from Sally at the postes-restantes when expected. And he had remembered nothing!
CHAPTER XVI
OF A WEDDING PARTY AND AN OLD MAN'S RETROSPECT. A HOPE OF RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE HEREAFTER. CHARLEY'S AUNT, AND PYRAMUS AND THISBE. HOW SALLY TRIED TO PUMP THE COLONEL AND GOT HALF A BUCKETFUL
And thus it came about that Rosalind Palliser (née Graythorpe) stood for the second time at the altar of matrimony with the same bridegroom under another name. The absence of bridesmaids pronounced and accented the fact that the bride was a widow, though, as there were very few of the congregation of St. Satisfax who did not know her as such, the announcement was hardly necessary. Discussion of who her late husband was, or was not, had long since given way to a belief that he was a bad lot, and that the less that was said about him the better. If any one who was present at the wedding was still constructing theories about his identity—whether he had divorced his wife, was divorced himself, or was dead—certainly none of those theories connected themselves with the present bridegroom. As for Sally, her only feeling, over and above her ordinary curiosity about her father, was a sort of paradoxical indignation that his intrusion into her mother's life should have prevented her daughter figuring as a bridesmaid. It would have been so jolly! But Sally was perfectly well aware that widows, strong-nerved from experience, stand in no need of official help in getting their "things" on, and acquiesced perforce in her position of a mere unqualified daughter.