And who can describe the excitement which was in all their minds when the moment of fate arrived? There were some parts of Duke’s speech which had been added in secret conclave between him and his sister, and of which even Mar knew nothing. The full brightness of the afternoon was still shining outside when the ladies of the family and their guests came into the marquee to hear the speeches, and the climax of the festivities was reached. When Mary came in, wearing as she always did in a modified form the dress of her widowhood, there was a breath of something like applause--a cheer subdued into a sort of sigh of sympathy and regard; for Mary was one of those women who are always popular, however little or much they may do to deserve it. It was perhaps only natural that Mrs. John, who had reigned at the Park for eleven years, whereas Mary’s interrupted sovereignty, during most part of which she was absent, scarcely exceeded half that period, should not like this expression of preference. But she did the wisest thing she could do in the circumstances, and appropriated as much as she could of it by drawing Mary’s arm through her own, and leading her up to the chief place. Lady Frogmore nodded and smiled to all her old acquaintances, the tenants whom she knew, as she walked up through the subdued light of the tent to the head of the table; and she touched Duke on the shoulder as she passed him with a caressing and encouraging gesture. Agnes, who came after, with a poignant sense of the boy’s trouble, and of the wrong he suffered, and of the strange position altogether, laid her hand on Mar’s shoulder as she passed with a consolatory touch. To Agnes it seemed all one gigantic wrong--the event and the occasion, the presence of these men, as ready to cheer one as another, to applaud whoever came before them. What right had Duke to come of age? What right had he to have a dinner given for him, to receive congratulations, as if he were a prince? Nothing satisfied Agnes, not even the natural fact of his twenty-first birthday! He seemed to take something from Mar even in reaching the age of twenty-one.