Not that Martha Jane, if for some reason the gods had chanced to see crooked for once, would not have recognised the occasion _as_ an occasion. The trouble would have lain in her method of dealing with it. She would have been pleased, of course, and even grateful after her fashion; but it would not have been a very delicate fashion. Martha Jane, to put it vulgarly, would have made a beano of it. She would have had a crowd about her at once, not only outside the house but also within, a slatternly, noisy crowd, as loose and degenerate as herself. Men would have looked in to drop her a ribald word of congratulation; grinning boys and inquisitive girls hung with cocked ears about the sill. And when finally she had set out to look at the house she would not have been alone, as Mrs. Clapham was alone; so much alone that even a passing soldier had turned to a photograph or a ghost. Some of her own sort would have been with her, without doubt, slovenly, down-at-heel, loose-moraled, loose-tongued. Their loud laughter over the fields would have startled the grazing cattle and fluttered the tranquil birds. Meeting the young soldier, they would have stopped to tell him the news, so that the current of beano-mirth would have caught and gathered him in. Would he still have been made happy, the charwoman wondered, by the blatant happiness of Martha Jane? Would he still have whistled his little tune when he had left them and gone on? As for the house itself, awakened from sleep by the noisy crew, she hardly dared bring herself even to think of it. Suddenly it would have heard them passing from room to room, those still-sacred rooms from which death had so recently gone out. Gradually the neighbours would have run to listen and look; passers-by pause in the road or come to lean on the little gate; until presently, by the end of the day which should have been all beauty and peace, Martha Jane would have made a cheap-jack booth of Ann Clapham’s House of Dreams.... The wedding-bells came to a lingering close as she got to the last stile, sliding, after a last, almost subdued peal, into a cadence of three notes, as if neither ringers nor ringing were able to stop; and followed, just when the ear had become perfectly sure of the end, by the single note that had frightened Emma. The tiny pause gave it both a purposeful and an accidental sound, and in both cases seemed to set it apart in meaning. It seemed somehow to leave the whole peal hanging in mid-air, and yet it had nothing to do with the peal at all. It was like a word spoken at a song’s end, that had nothing to do with the finished song, but was quickly and firmly beginning a new....