“There they are!” cried Mrs. Ferguson; and the bride, who had been sitting beside her on the sofa, passive, silent, all but motionless, started a little.

“Oh, I’m so glad!” she said, in the first natural tone that had been heard in her voice all day.  “I did so want to see the children.”

Dr. Grey went out of the room at once, and Mrs. Ferguson had the good sense to follow, taking her husband with her.  “For,” as she said afterward, “the first sight of three stepchildren, and she, poor dear, such a mere girl, must be a very unpleasant thing.”  For her part, she was thankful that when she married James Ferguson he was a bachelor, with not a soul belonging to him except an old aunt.  She wouldn’t like to be in poor Mrs. Grey’s shoes—­“dear me, no!”—­with those two old ladies who have lived at the Lodge ever since the first Mrs. Grey died.  She wondered how on earth Miss Oakley would manage them.  And upon James Ferguson’s suggesting “in the same way as she managed every body,” his wife soundly berated him for saying such a silly thing, though he had, with the usual acuteness of silent people, said a wiser thing than he was aware of.

Meantime Christian was left alone, for the first time that day, and many days; for solitude was a blessing not easy to get in the Ferguson’s large, bustling family.  Perhaps she did not seek it—­perhaps she dared not.  Anyhow, during the month that had been occupied with her marriage preparations, she had scarcely been ten minutes alone, not even at night, for two children shared her room—­the loving little things whom she had taught for two years, first as daily, and then as resident governess, and to whom she had persisted in giving lessons till the last.

She stood with the same fixed composedness—­not composure—­of manner; the quietness of a person who, having certain things to go through, goes through them in a sort of dream, almost without recognizing her own identity.  Women, more than men, are subject to this strange, somnambulistic, mental condition, the result of strong emotion, in which they both do and endure to an extent that men would never think of or find possible.

After a minute she moved slightly, took up and laid down a book, but still mechanically, as if she did not quite know what she was doing until, suddenly, she caught sight of her wedding-ring.  She regarded it with something very like affright; tried convulsively to pull it off; but it was rather tight; and before it had passed a finger-joint she had recollected herself and pressed it down again.

“It is too late now.  He is so good—­every body says so—­and he is so very good to me.”

She spoke aloud, though she was alone in the room, or rather because she was alone, after a habit which, like all solitarily reared and dreamy persons, Christian had had all her life—­her young, short life—­only twenty-one years—­and yet it seemed to her a whole, long, weary existence.