Edward rushed from his mother's room, and when he had packed his possessions went to Bates, the old butler, and asked him for the servants' cart to take his luggage to Long Orchard Farm. His mother's last speech had made much easier the task of cutting himself off from his family, and when he set out down the drive he had not one regret for what he was losing. Edward depended much on other people, and now that one of those on whom he had most securely depended had let him fall, he clung more closely to the other. Elizabeth had long lamented the worry she was likely to prove to him when his family was informed of the marriage, and he was glad now to be able to meet her before the day with the news that he owned no family except hers. How surprised she would be to see him again so soon, for they had just lived through that passionate farewell until they should meet to-morrow morning at the door of the church. A misgiving came over Edward. What if Elizabeth should be so much distressed by the news of the breach that she should not keep her word? Was it wise in any case to upset her on the eve of the wedding? Let her sleep to-night, or if she lay awake on this vigil let her thoughts be serene as the summer night and radiant as the summer dawn. He would beg a night's lodging from the Vicar, who was already so deep in Sir Richard's bad graces that one more act of defiance could not add to his offense. Edward found his friend the Vicar, an old Tractarian who had somehow eluded Sir Richard's Protestant zeal and been presented to the living of Barton Flowers, sympathetic and encouraging. The old man sat in his dusty room amid a chaos of theological tomes and held forth upon the sacramental wonder of marriage, reaching from time to time for a book from his shelves, usually the work of some Anglo-Catholic divine of the seventeenth century, in whose sonorous periods human love was exalted and sanctified and whose dying cadences showed forth mortality in the image of Almighty God. "Marriage is too sacred a rite to be regulated by worldly considerations," the priest said. "You are justified by your singleness of purpose. You have acted loyally to the woman of your choice. You have nothing to reproach yourself for." Edward had been glad to avail himself of the Vicar's help to assure Elizabeth that she was not outraging decency by marrying him; but he had never occupied his mind with the demands of religion, and only now for the first time he was deeply impressed by a sudden consciousness of what a weight of moral and spiritual support stood behind him in what he was about to do. From that moment he looked at religion with new eyes, apprehending in it the possibility of so crystallizing his indeterminate aspirations as even at this late hour of youth to do something and be somebody. He went up to bed in a glow of ambition that lighted his spirit, even as the candle lighted the dark corridors and stairways of the Vicarage.