“What a lucky girl you are!”

I began to think I was.  I found it impossible to remain unaffected by the whirlwind of joyous turmoil in which I lived.  The refulgence of the present hour wiped out the past, which seemed to fade away altogether.  After the first few days I was flying about from place to place, and wherever I went I was a subject for congratulation and envy.

If there were moments of misgiving, when, like the cold wind out of a tunnel, there came the memory of the Reverend Mother and the story she had told me at Nemi, there were other moments when I felt quite sure that, in marrying Lord Raa, I should be doing a self-sacrificing thing and a kind of solemn duty.

One such moment was when Mr. Curphy, my father’s advocate, who with his clammy hands always made me think of an over-fatted fish, came to tell him that, after serious legal difficulties, the civil documents had been agreed to, for, after he had finished with my father, he drew me aside and said, as he smoothed his long brown beard: 

“You ought to be a happy girl, Mary.  I suppose you know what you are doing for your father?  You are wiping out the greatest disappointment of his life, and rectifying the cruelty—­the inevitable cruelty—­of the law, when you were born a daughter after he had expected a son.”

Another such moment was when the Bishop came, in his grand carriage, to say that after much discussion he had persuaded his lordship to sign the necessary declaration that all the children of our union, irrespective of sex, should be brought up as Catholics, for taking me aside, as the advocate had done the day before, he said, in his suave voice, fingering his jewelled cross: 

“I congratulate you, my child.  Yours is a great and precious privilege—­the privilege of bringing back to the Church a family which has been estranged from it for nineteen years.”

At the end of a fortnight we signed the marriage settlement.  The little ceremony took place in the drawing-room of my father’s house.  My intended husband, who had not been to see me in the meantime, brought with him (as well as his trustee and lawyer) a lady and a gentleman.

The lady was his maiden aunt, Lady Margaret Anslem, a fair woman of about forty, fashionably dressed, redolent of perfume, and (except to me, to whom she talked quite amicably) rather reserved and haughty, as if the marriage of her nephew into our family were a bitter pill which she had compelled herself to swallow.

The gentleman was a tall young man wearing a very high collar and cravat, and using a handkerchief with embroidered initials in the corner of it.  He turned out to be the Hon. Edward Eastcliff—­the great friend who, being rich enough to please himself, was about to marry the professional beauty.

I noticed that Aunt Bridget, with something of the instinct of the fly about the flame, immediately fixed herself upon the one, and that Betsy Beauty attached herself to the other.