With her usual patience she shouldered the burden and bore it. She guessed, with her quick, sensitive sympathy, that perhaps it hurt mamma less to adopt this attitude. Her daughter was sacrificing herself to her family. To admit this stunning weight of obligation must, of course, be painful. Mamma always shrank from painful things. She had discovered this pose of hers as a kind of refuge from humiliation. Virgie accepted it meekly. Nevertheless, the tears which it wrung from her in the darkness of her last night at home were bitter, and could not be checked for a long time. The knowledge that Gaunt was in the town, that he had arrived by the last train the previous night, and was putting up at the Ducal Arms near the station, seemed to render sleep impossible. She could not tell why. Not till five o'clock had struck was she compelled by mere exhaustion to close her eyes. All her life Virginia had been a poor eater, and the least excitement was wont to deprive her of appetite. As a result of this, she had eaten, during the past ten days, barely enough to keep her alive. There was nobody to notice what she ate, or whether she took a sufficient quantity. As she had been under-nourished for the last two years, with the sole exception of her fortnight with the Rosenbergs, during great part of which mental agitation had made it difficult for her to eat, she was in a state of real debility. Wholly inadequate did she feel for what lay before her--the new beginning, the effort to understand the unknown being whom she was to marry, the settling into strange surroundings. Her weakness and discouragement were so profound that, by the time she had arisen, dressed for church, and passed through the sharp and biting agony of her parting from Pansy, she was reduced to a state of passive endurance. All the way to church she talked feverishly, eagerly to Tony of what they would do in the future. She would pay his pocket money out of her own allowance. He was to join the school O.T.C. at once, so that he might go into camp at the end of term.... In such plans as these lay her only anodyne. Her mother was reduced to complete silence. Mrs. Mynors--in her own opinion--was the interesting and tragic heroine of this occasion. She, in all her beauty, all her desolation, had been passed by in favour of her inexperienced, immature daughter. The pathos of her position--left in Laburnum Villa while Virginia went to take up a place in county society--flooded her with self-pity. Never had she felt capable of such an intensity of emotion as upon this day, when she was carried helpless to church to give her daughter away. Never had she come so near to being primally and brutally elementary as at the moment when the carriage stopped at the church door, and Gaunt came forward, greeting her with: "Good morning, my mother-in-law!"