"You have still a perfectly good right to change your mind, but it mustn't be just on impulse. We're going to leave you now for thirty minutes. When the time is up I'll be back and if you want to begin dressing--all right." She paused a moment and then with a defiant stiffening of her slender figure she announced crisply. "And if you _don't_ want to, I'll go downstairs and tell them that you've decided not to be married." "What will they think of you?" Mary Barrascale had reached a condition from which her contributions to the talk emerged in appalled gasps. Eleanor wheeled on her. "They can think what they jolly well like," she announced with a fine abandon of recklessness. Feeling like watchers beside a jury-room door, the two bridesmaids kept vigil, harboring contrary hopes. Left alone in her room, the girl stood for a while gazing about her as if her wild eyes were seeking for some secret panel that might open in the walls and give her escape. She must think! There was little enough time at best to bring order out of this panic-ridden confusion of her thoughts. But her mind was like a stream in freshet. It could only race and swirl along one channel, and that was the spillway of memories. Stuart Farquaharson the boy; Stuart the man, coming to her at Chatham; Stuart standing self-governed as her father scourged him with abuse; Stuart the lover; all those semblances passed before her until her world seemed peopled with them, and her old love grew clamorous in resurrection--and insurrection. In a little while she would be--unless she halted here--holding up her hand for Eben's ring, and at the thought a sickness swept over her. It was impossible. Instead of victory it was, after all, an abject and hideous surrender. She could not face it and all that must come after it. Then she heard a feeble rap on her door. At the threshold stood the wheelchair to which her father was confined like a slave chained to his seat in the galley. She caught a brief impression of a pair of eyes beyond him: the eyes of Eleanor Kent, full of the message of strength; eyes that seemed to be saying, "Stand firm. Be sure!" But nearer at hand was the face with skin drawn like parchment over its bony angles, deeply lined with suffering, and crowned with a great shock of snowy hair. The features, though, were only details of setting for the spirit of the keen eyes that had always burned with an eagle fierceness and an unyielding aggressiveness. Now they were different, and as the guests who had brought the chair and its occupant up the stairs and into the room withdrew in silent respect, the daughter's gaze was held by them with a mesmeric force. It was a face transfigured; a face in which the hardness of fight had died into the serenity of peace. Angles and wrinkles had become only lines of emphasis for this new tranquillity of the eyes; eyes that might have seen a vision of divine accolade and were at peace.