“We are all sorry for your brother,” Unity answered gently, and then would speak no more, but sat in her silver and roses, looking out into the heat and light.  The Greenwood road was reached in silence.  Cary put his head out of the window and called to old Philip.  The coach came slowly to a stop before a five-barred gate.  Mingo opened the door, and the young man got out.  “Unless you think I might go with you as far as the church—­” he suggested, with his hand on the door.  Unity shook her head.  “You can’t do that, you know!  Besides, I am going first to Cousin Jane Selden’s.  Good-bye.  Oh, it is going to be a happy marriage—­it must be happy!”

“What is going to make it happy?” demanded Cary gloomily.  “It’s a match against nature!  When I think of your cousin in that old whitewashed house, and every night Gideon Rand’s ghost making tobacco around it!  I am glad that Ludwell has gone to Richmond.  He looks like a ghost himself.”

“Oh, the world!” sighed Unity.  “Tell Philip, please, to drive on.”

“I’ll ride over to Fontenoy to-morrow,” said Fairfax Cary. “’Twill do you good to talk it over.”

The coach went heavily on through the dust of the Three-Notched Road.  The locusts shrilled, the pines gave no shade, in the angle of the snake fences pokeberry and sumach drooped their dusty leaves.  The light air in the pine-tops sounded like the murmur of a distant sea, too far off for coolness.  Unity sighed with the oppression of it all.  The flowers were withering in her lap.  After a long hour the road turned, discovering yellow wheat-fields and shady orchards, the gleam of a shrunken stream and a brick house embowered in wistaria.  Around the horse-block and in the shade of a great willow were standing a coach or two, a chaise, and several saddle-horses.  “All of them Republican,” commented Unity.

At the door she was met by Cousin Jane Selden herself, a thin and dark old lady with shrewd eyes and a determined chin.  “I’m glad to see you, Unity, though I should have been more glad to see Richard and Edward Churchill!  ‘Woe to a stiff-necked generation!’ says the Bible.  Well! you are fine enough, child, and I honour you for it!  There are a few people in the parlour—­just those who go to church with us.  The clock has struck, and we’ll start in half an hour.  Jacqueline is in her room, and when she doesn’t look like an angel she looks like her mother.  You had best go upstairs.  Mammy Chloe dressed her.”

Unity mounted the dark, polished stairs to an upper hall where stood a tall clock and a spindle-legged table with a vast jar of pot-pourri.  A door opened, framing Jacqueline, dressed in white, and wearing her mother’s wedding veil.  “I knew your step,” she said.  “Oh, Unity, you are good to come!”

In the bedroom they embraced.  “Wild horses couldn’t have kept me from coming!” declared Unity with resolute gaiety.  “Whichever married first, the other was to be bridesmaid!—­we arranged that somewhere in the dark ages!  Oh, Jacqueline, you are like a princess in a picture-book!”