After Anne had left her, subdued but jubilant, she lay there and remembered, with a twinge of humiliation, that the night before she had hurried downstairs in a mad rush to death. Anything--anything to escape from the coil of horror closing in on her!... And it had sufficed to her to meet Enid Drover in the hall, with that silly chatter about the house next door, to check the impulse, drive her back into the life she was flying from.... She reflected with self-derision that all her suicidal impulses seemed to end in the same way; by landing her in the arms of some man she didn’t care for. Then she remembered Anne’s illuminated face, and lay listening to the renewed life of the house, the bustle of happy preparations going on all about her. “Poor Fred! Well--if it’s what he wants--” she thought. What she herself wanted, all she now wanted, was never again to see that dreadful question in Anne’s eyes. And she had found no other way of evading it. XXVI. Now that a day for the wedding was fixed, the preparations went on more rapidly. Soon there was only a fortnight left; then only ten days; then a week. Chris Fenno’s parents were to have come to New York to make the acquaintance of their son’s betrothed; but though a date had several times been appointed for their visit, Mrs. Fenno, whose health was not good, had never been well enough to come, and finally it was arranged that Anne should go to Baltimore to see them. She was to stay with the Maclews, who immediately seized the opportunity to organize a series of festivities in celebration of the event. Lilla invited Mrs. Clephane to come with her daughter; but Kate declined, on the plea that she herself was not well. People were beginning to notice how tired and thin she looked. Her glass showed streaks of gray in her redundant hair, and about her lips and eyes the little lines she had so long kept at bay. Everybody in the family agreed that it would be a good thing for her to have a few days’ rest before the wedding. With regard to her own future she had sworn Anne to unconditional secrecy. She explained that she did not intend to give Fred Landers a definite answer till after the wedding, and Anne, who had all the Clephane reticence, understood her wish to keep the matter quiet, and even in her guardian’s presence was careful not to betray that she knew of his hopes. She only made him feel that he was more than ever welcome, and touched him by showing an added cordiality at a moment when most girls are deaf and blind to all human concerns but their own. “It’s so like Anne to find time to remember an old derelict just when she might be excused for forgetting that any of us exist.” He said it with a gentle complacency as he sat in Mrs. Clephane’s sitting-room one evening during Anne’s absence. “She’s like you--very like you,” he added, looking at Kate Clephane with shy beseeching eyes.