Chris glanced round for a missile, found none, so decided to ignore him.

“Yes,” she said to her fiance, “and we are going to carry bouquets of wheat and cornflowers.”

“Sounds like the ingredients of a pudding,” said Rupert.

Chris rose from the piano in disgust, and her brother instantly slipped into her place.  “I say, Hilda,” he called, “come and sing!  There’s no one to listen to you but me; but that’s a detail.  Trevor and Christina, pray consider yourselves excused.”

“We don’t want to be excused,” said Chris mutinously “Do stop, Rupert!  Cinders doesn’t like it.”

Rupert, however, was already crashing through Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, and turned a deaf ear.  She picked the discontented one up to comfort him, and as she did so Trevor moved up to her.  He stood beside her for a few seconds, stroking the dog’s soft head.

Chris looked hot and uncomfortable, as if Rupert’s music pounded on her nerves; but yet she would not make a move.  She stood hushing Cinders as if he had been an infant.

“Shall we go outside?” Mordaunt said at last.

She shook her head.

“Come!” he said gently.

She turned without a word, laid the dog tenderly in a chair, whispered to him, kissed him, and went to the open window.

They stepped out together, and the curtains met behind them.

The moon had passed out of sight behind the houses, but the sky was alight with stars.  A faint breeze trembled through the trees in the quiet square garden, and the faint, wonderful essence of summer came from them.  From a distance sounded the roar of countless wheels—­the deep chorus of London’s traffic.

They stood side by side in silence while behind them Rupert played the Wedding March to a triumphant end.  Then quiet descended, and there came a long pause.

Chris broke it at last, moved, and shyly spoke.  “Trevor!”

“What is it, dear?”

She drew slightly towards him, and at once he put a quiet arm about her.  “I want to tell you something,” she said.

“Something serious?” he questioned.

“I—­I don’t know.”  A faint note of distress sounded in her voice.  She laid her cheek suddenly against his shoulder with a very confiding gesture.  “I’m not quite happy,” she said.

He held her closer.  “Tell me, Chris!” he said very tenderly.

She uttered a little laugh that had a sob in it.  “It’s only that—­that I can’t help feeling that you’re making rather a bad bargain.  You know, the other day—­when—­when you proposed to me—­I didn’t have time to think.  I’ve been thinking since.”

“Yes?” he said.

“Yes.  And now and then—­only now and then—­I feel rather bad.  I—­I like fair play, Trevor.  It isn’t right for me to take so much and give—­so little.”  Her voice quivered perceptibly, and she ceased to speak.  He pressed her closer to him, but he remained silent for several seconds.