The Rector came and put his hand on his wife’s shoulder softly. He well knew how awful this too-late awakening of the other woman’s motherhood was to her, with her own so terribly, persistently wide-awake and alive with the throbbing of unsatisfied pain. There was nothing further to be said, nothing, altogether unsatisfactory as everything was. Mr. Fellowes felt this and said in his bright frank way. “We are all very tired, and you—” he said, turning to his wife, “you are frightfully washed out! And, good gracious! Dacre is waiting all this time!” To her own intense amazement, Mrs. Fellowes stooped down and gave Mrs. Waring a kiss. The other’s tremor went through her like an electric shock and she did not get over it for the rest of the evening. CHAPTER XXIV. THE day after the wedding Dacre decided to depart in rather indecent haste. The situation was too much for him. All the morning he had been receiving a succession of small shocks, but some time after lunch he experienced an awful one. He caught his mother’s eyes fixed on him with such a dumb yearning as would have upset a rhinoceros, not to say Dacre, and he could have sworn to two tears that gathered in them and were as suddenly dried up. He blushed furiously and fled, in a terrible access of shyness, to the Rectory, where he astonished Mrs. Fellowes by the heat of his countenance and his greedy consumption of tea. “Good gracious!” she thought, “is he in love—Dacre?” She took up her cup, and gulping down her tea in rather an hysterical way, she watched him over the edge of it. “The colour, and the stutter, and that awful thirst, they are all deadly symptoms. On the contrary, the amount of cake he swallows goes against it. What can it be anyway? Mercy! Can’t he hurry? I feel worn out between them all.” Presently Dacre recovered a little and began to talk in a desultory way, saying a vast number of things he didn’t want to say, but on the whole lucidly enough. Mrs. Fellowes pricked up her ears and grew keen all over, she got for her pains little direct information but, with a previous experience of the family, enough to go on. “Worse than lovers!” she thought ruefully, “poor little woman! All the same, I am not the least surprised he wants to clear—he ought to stay though!” “Dacre, your mother will miss Gwen more than any of us think, you have no idea how upsetting a wedding is, you might come in very useful just now. Won’t the regiment survive if you stay down for a few days?” Dacre wriggled on his seat. “Mrs. Fellowes, I have to go back, it is absolutely imperative.” She laughed. “So it seems by the look of you!”