She surveyed Foxy, full of vitality after the drive; the bird, moping and rough; the rabbit, with one ear inside out, looking far from respectable. She heard the ventriloquistic mews. 'I don't want them, dear,' she said with great decision. 'It's a bit of a cats' 'ome you're starting, mum,' said Abel. Mrs. Marston found no words for her emotions. But while Edward and Abel bestowed the various animals, she said to Martha: 'Weddings are not what they were, Martha.' 'Bride to groom,' said Martha, who always read the local weddings: 'a one-eyed cat; a foolish rabbit as'd be better in a pie; an ill-contrived bird; and a filthy smelly fox!' Mrs. Marston relaxed her dignity so far as to laugh softly. She decided to give Martha a rise next year. Chapter 17 Hazel sat on a large flat gravestone with Foxy beside her. They were like a sculpture in marble on some ancient tomb. Coming, so soon after her strange moment of terror in the quarry, to this place of the dead, she was smitten with formless fear. The crosses and stones had, on that storm-beleaguered hillside, an air of horrible bravado, as if they knew that although the winds were stronger than they, yet they were stronger than humanity; as if they knew that the whole world is the tomb of beauty, and has been made by man the torture-chamber of weakness. She looked down at the lettering on the stone. It was a young girl's grave. 'Oh!' she muttered, looking up into the tremendous dome of blue, empty and adamantine--'oh! dunna let me go young! What for did she dee so young? Dunna let me! dunna!' And the vast dome received her prayer, empty and adamantine. She was suddenly panic-stricken; she ran away from the tombs calling Edward's name. And Edward came on the instant. His hands were full of cabbage which he had been taking to the rabbit. 'What is it, little one?' 'These here!' 'The graves?' 'Ah. They'm so drodsome.' Edward pointed to a laburnum-tree which had rent a tomb, and now waved above it. 'See,' he said. 'Out of the grave and gate of death--' 'Ah! But her as went in hanna come out. On'y a new tree. I'll be bound she wanted to come out.' At this moment Edward's friend, who was to marry them, arrived. 'Now I shall go and wait for you to come,' Edward whispered. Waiting in the dim chapel, with its whitewashed walls and few leaded windows half covered with ivy, his mind was clear of all thoughts but unselfish ones. His mother, trailing purple, came in, and thought how like a sacred picture he looked; this, for her, was superlative praise. Martha's brother was there, ringing the one bell, which gave such a small fugitive sound that it made the white chapel seem like a tinkling bell-wether lost on the hills. Mr. James was there, and several of the congregation, and Martha, with her best dress hastily donned over her print, and a hat of which her brother said 'it 'ud draw tears from an egg.'