And now Catherine's wedding was only a few days off. It was to take place at an early hour in the morning and she was to sleep at Mrs. Job's house on the preceding night. But though her prospects were so good and though she was leaving a life of hard work for one of comparative ease; though Charles's wrath had cooled during their long walk, she stood at the gate of the farm looking after him with a downcast heart. She had expected to be so happy, but it had been a day of tears. He had not said a word about his broken promise, and she had not found courage to speak of it. CHAPTER II A NIGHT OF STARS CHAPTER II A NIGHT OF STARS ON the night before Catherine Dennis's wedding the spangled sky spread, still and cloudless, above Pencoed Chapel. The plain squareness of the house of worship, and the treeless stretch surrounding it and Mrs. Job's cottage hard by, looked all the plainer for the white points of light that burned in remote solemnity over the mountain. The building, but for the one insignificant dwelling, was, as it were, the solitary feature in a bare world; and the starlight on the grey walls gave them an even greater austerity than they had by day. In the moonless night the gravestones round the chapel, having no shadows to throw them into relief, were merged into general neutrality with the grass. The sharpest things in earth or heaven were the angles of Cassiopeia's Chair, high among the constellations, which seemed not to look down on the sleep-bound world but to be turning from it, consciously aloof in their unwavering detachment; a sight to affect some not at all; to oppress some by the comparison of infinitude with their own individualities; to raise others, by that very comparison, to the height of ecstasy--the dim foreknowledge of what that true sense of proportion must be which swallows the individual into the immutable and divine. At the back of Mrs. Job's house the small barn, which had been made habitable as a lodging for travelling preachers, contained a single light; and Mrs. Job, whose eye had caught the glimmer, crossed the intervening space in the darkness and pushed the door open. Catherine Dennis rose from her knees at the bedside and faced her, startled, with parted lips. Though it was late she had not undressed, and, for a girl on the eve of her wedding to a man she was supposed to love, her look was curious. Perhaps she stood in awe of the morrow and of the changes it must bring. There was an air of tension hanging over the bare little room with its scanty, rough furnishings. Catherine's hat lay on the bed; it was as if she had touched nothing, displaced nothing, since she entered the place; only the depressions made by her elbows on the bedcover were so deep they looked like dark pools in the coarse white material. She confronted Mrs. Job with the face of one caught in some evil act. The woman's sharp eyes took in every detail of the scene. She indulged in no useless comment, for it was not her way.