He kissed some colour into her white cheeks and lips; and then the wedding party began to flock in. Carriage after carriage drove up, and the bridesmaids and young men, the older relatives and friends, crowded the drawing-room, and there were embracings and congratulations--not half over when luncheon was announced. It was a gay, or a seemingly gay wedding breakfast. Joan went through it all with a curious feeling of unreality. She heard herself and her loved husband toasted, she heard his eloquent yet well-balanced little speech. She smiled upon those who spoke to her with the almost reverential solicitude with which a bride is addressed on her marriage day, and she muttered some reply, although she did not seem to gather the meaning of their speeches. She cut the cake, she rose and adjourned upstairs when the rest went to the drawing-room. Happily, she had to hurry her "going away" toilette, which was presided over by her aunt, in the seventh heaven of delight at her only niece’s splendid marriage, and by her aunt’s maid--Julie having already started with Lord Vansittart’s valet and the luggage, to be on board the yacht with everything ready when the bride and bridegroom arrived. Happily there was not a spare moment to be wasted if they meant to "catch the train" they had planned to start by. Before she was quite ready, Vansittart’s voice was heard outside the door, hurrying them. They were obliged to hasten their farewells, and drive rapidly to the station--the terminus they were starting from no one knew but Sir Thomas, who was bound to secresy. But even when the express was rattling across the sunlit country seawards, Joan feverishly told herself that she was not yet safe. Since that posy was offered her at the church door, since she had read those awful words written on the label, and had looked into those menacing blue eyes, a renewed, augmented fear had seemed to half paralyze her, body and soul; more than fear, worse than dread--a horrible conviction of coming doom. It asserted itself even when she lay on her husband’s breast in their reserved compartment, listening to the passionate utterances of intense and devoted love with which he hoped to dispel her nervous terrors--terrors which, although he began to understand that she had unfortunately been drawn into being one of the actors in an undesirable life drama, he regarded as mere vapours which could be dispelled by an equable, peaceful life shared by him and ruled by common sense. Those clear, threatening blue eyes seemed still gazing into hers, penetrating to the secrets hidden in her soul. All through Vansittart’s endearing words, the bright pictures he verbally drew of their coming happiness, those words repeated themselves in her ears--"Vengeance is Mine! I will repay, saith the Lord!"