Slightly varied, it always comes back as a question, a wonder, a reflection, and she learns to recognize with a terrible sharpness the signs of its approach. Her uncle’s own illness seems to be in abeyance, kept at arm’s length by the force of his will, and through those dreadful days of waiting his spirit maintains a strange level of exaltation. “We put the saddle on the wrong horse when we called him Milksop!” Lavinia hears him say repeatedly, in a tone of triumph. He is very tender in his manner towards his niece, going entirely out of his own character to entreat her to eat, and trying humbly to emulate the son he had despised in self-forgetting attentions, and he rives her heart and conscience unknowingly by the sympathy and pity for her in her tragically interrupted nuptials, which every one of his words and actions implies. CHAPTER XXI The day that was to have been that of Rupert Campion and Lavinia Carew’s wedding has come. “I am always afraid of some ill luck when the bride does not change her initials,” Miss Brine has said in the Rectory school-room, in answer to the children’s lamenting comment upon the fact. A thoughtful silence follows the governess’s utterance, broken by Phillida, who says meditatively-- “Then if Lavy had married Captain Binning, she would have been all right.” But the wily Brine is not to be trapped into any such admission. “Miss Carew would undoubtedly have changed her initials in that case,” she replies cautiously. Lavinia had hoped that her uncle would--in the general upsetting consequent upon the catastrophe, the removal of all the landmarks of ordinary life--have forgotten to note the date of a day so outwardly identical with its gloomy fellows that it would have passed unnoticed in its obscurity and disgrace; but luncheon-time undeceives her. “This is not quite the way in which we expected to pass this day!” he says, after sending away the servants. “It is rather rough on you; but there is a French saying, I believe, that what is deferred is not therefore lost. There may be a good time coming.” The cheerfulness valiantly forced into the old voice for her sake, in his new selflessness, must, at whatever cost to herself, be met in the same spirit, and she compels herself to repeat in French the saying he has alluded to, with what--since intention is everything--must do duty for a smile, “Ce qui est différe n’est point perdu.” “Though it may not be to-morrow or the day after, we shall perhaps still hear Darcy exhorting you and him to increase and multiply!” continues Sir George, with a distressing attempt at pleasantry, and a painful harking back to his old theme. “In any case, it will do no harm to drink to your wedding day. Come, let me fill your glass.”