cannot serve God and Mammon.’  When the old man tried to show her that there was no question of Mammon here, she evaded him, as she always did on such occasions, either by a real or simulated deficiency of consequent intelligence.  She regarded John Caldigate as being altogether unregenerate, and therefore a man of the world,—­and therefore a disciple of Mammon.  She asked him whether he wanted her to do what she thought to be sinful.  ’It is very sinful hating people as you hate my sons’ families,’ he said in his wrath.  ’No, Nicholas, I do not hate their families.  I certainly do not hate Margaret, nor yet Fanny;—­but I think that they live in opposition to the Gospel.  Am I to belie my own belief?’ Now the old man was quite certain that his wife did hate both Robert’s wife and William’s and would not admit in her own mind this distinction between the conduct of persons and the persons themselves.  But he altogether failed in his attempts to induce her to go to the breakfast.

The great contest was between the mother and the daughter; but in all that passed between them no reference was even made to the banquet.  As to that Hester was indifferent.  She thought, on the whole, that her mother would do best to be absent.  After all, what is a breakfast;—­or what the significance of any merry-meeting, even for a wedding?  There would no doubt be much said and much done on such an occasion at variance with her mother’s feelings.  Even the enforced gaiety of the dresses would be distasteful to her, and there would hardly be sufficient cause for pressing her to be present on such an occasion.  But in reference to the church, the question, to Hester’s thinking, was very different, ‘Mamma,’ she said, ’if you are not there, it will be a lasting misery to me.’

’How can I go there when I would give so much to save you from going there yourself?’ This was a terrible thing for a mother to say to her own child on the eve of her wedding, but it had been now said so often as to have lost something of its sting.  It had come to be understood that Mrs. Bolton would not allow herself to give any assent to the marriage, but that the marriage was to go on without such assent.  All that had been settled.  But still she might go to the church with them and pray for good results.  She feared that evil would come, but still she might wish for good,—­wish for it and pray for it.

‘You don’t want me to be unhappy, mamma?’

‘Want!’ said the mother.  ’Who can want her child to be unhappy?  But there is an unhappiness harder to be borne, more to be dreaded, enduring so much longer than that which we may suffer here.’