She dropped her face into her hands, and sat there propping her elbows on the card-table, and laughing out between her intercrossed fingers: “A really gay wedding, you know....” XXVII. Only three days more now; for just three days more she and Anne would live under one roof. And then? The interrogation was not Anne’s. The news of Mrs. Clephane’s intended marriage had completely restored the girl’s serenity. Chris Fenno, detained in Baltimore by his mother’s sudden and somewhat alarming illness, had not yet reappeared; it seemed likely now that he would arrive in New York only the day before the wedding. Anne was to have her mother to herself to the last; and with every art of tenderness and dependence she tried to show her appreciation of these final days, sweet with the sweetness of dear things ending, yet without pain because they were not to precede a real separation. Her only anxiety--the alarm about Mrs. Fenno--had been allayed by a reassuring telegram, and she moved within that rainbow bubble that once or twice in life contrives to pass itself off as the real horizon. The sight of her, Kate Clephane reasoned, ought to have been justification enough. Anything was worth doing or sacrificing to keep the bubble unbroken. And the last three days would pass--the Day itself would pass. The world, after it was over, would go on in the same old way. What was all the flurry about? Mrs. Drover did not find it easy to maintain so detached an attitude. She, for one, could not conceive how her sister-in-law could remain so calm at such a moment. “Of course Nellie’s wonderfully capable; she and Lilla have taken almost all the worry on their shoulders, haven’t they? I never could have struggled alone with that immense list of invitations. But still I don’t think you ought to assume that _everything’s_ settled. After all, there are only three days left! And no one seems to have even begun to think who’s going to take you up the aisle....” “Up the aisle?” Mrs. Clephane echoed blankly. “Well, yes, my dear. There _is_ an aisle at St. Stephen’s,” Enid Drover chirped with one of her rare attempts at irony. “And of course Hendrik must take up the bride, and you must be there, ready to receive her and give her away....” “Give her away?” “Hadn’t you thought of that either?” Mrs. Drover’s little laugh had a tinge of condescension. Though all the family had conspired to make Mrs. Clephane forget that she had lived for nearly twenty years outside the social pale, the fact remained; she _had_. And it was on just such occasions as this that she betrayed it, somewhat embarrassingly to her sister-in-law. Not even to know that, when a bride’s father was dead, it was her mother who gave her away! “You didn’t expect Hendrik to do it?” Mrs. Drover rippled on, half compassionate, half contemptuous. It was hard to understand how some people contrived to remain in ignorance of the most elementary rules of behaviour!