Poor Sancie nodded, not able to look up. Alas for her secrets, offered, taken, and forgotten! But Vicky's vivacious fingers groped in her empty cupboard. “And then, as well as that, you _ought_ to love him. You see, you've promised; it's all been made so sacred. You never forget it--the clergyman, and the altar, and the hymns. You're all in white--veiled. And you kneel there--before the altar--and he holds your hand. And the ring, oh, Sancie, the feeling of the ring!” She opened her little hand and looked down at the smoothed gold, coiled below the diamonds and pearls. “You never forget the first feel of that. It means--everything!” She blushed, and said, in a hushed sort of way, “It meant--Dickie, to me.” Sanchia drooped and bled. Vicky, deep in her holy joys, was remorseless. Even when she turned once more to her sister's affairs her consolation made wounds. “Cuthbert said that it would come all right now--now that Mrs. Ingram-the wife--was--That's rather horrible. Even you must feel that. Instead of being sorry that his wife is dead, one has to be awfully glad. I suppose you felt that at once; and of course _he_ did. Poor woman! I wonder if she was buried in her ring.” She eyed her own. “No one would dare take it off. I made Cuthbert promise me this morning. But--of course people do marry again, and it will be practically the same as that.” She reflected. “Yes, practically, it will, but--oh, it's very extraordinary! You've had all your fun of engagement and all that, long ago.” She looked down deeply at her hand; and then she gazed at her sister. “And, oh, Sancie, you've had your honeymoon!” Before the deadly simplicity of that last stroke Sanchia fell, and lay quivering. She could not ask for mercy, she could explain, extenuate, nothing. Huddled she lay. At this aching moment the one thing that the world held worth her having seemed to be the approbation of this butterfly child. For Vicky's happiness was specific. Nuptial bliss lay, as it were, crystallised within it. There are moments in one's life when love itself seems lust, and safety the only holy thing. Vicky, tearing at her heart, had turned her head. Vicky once gone, with promise of frequent intercourse by letter and otherwise, it was to Philippa's fine house and respectable man-servant she next surrendered herself. The meeting was cool, but not intolerable to a goddess sore from Vicky's whip. Philippa could ply a longer lash, but not by the same right, nor with the same passion to drive it home. Sanchia's eyes met hers upon the level; and if the elder had a firmly modelled chin, so had the younger sister. Her strength, too, lay, as it always had, in saying little, whereas Philippa's _forte_ was dialogue. But it needs two for that. After the first greeting there came a pause, in which the embarrassment, upon the whole, was Mrs. Tompsett-King's.