So in due course south I went.

Paul met me—­handsomer and more dictatorial than ever; his blue eyes clear and piercing as before.  He seemed quite pleased; said Stephen Vandeleur was a good fellow; was most impertinently sarcastic about Duncan’s aristocratic guests; and altogether appeared in good spirits.  Janet I did not think looking well.  She seemed very nervous, and made the remark that she wished it were six months ago; but of course it was natural a girl should be a little hysterical on the eve of her wedding-day.

The morrow came, and the wedding with it.  I thought it a very unpleasant one.  Whatever might be Stephen Vandeleur’s own feelings, he seemed, as Paul said, a very good fellow.  It was evident his friends only countenanced it on consideration of the huge dowry Janet brought with her.  Some of them were gentlepeople, as I understand the word, and some were not; but Duncan, who appeared really to think the mere accident of superior birth in itself a guarantee of personal merit, as Paul very truly put it, grovelled all round, until I was sick with shame.  Paul, however, was at his best and wittiest and brightest, and kept everybody in tolerably good humour.

When the carriage came to take the bride and bridegroom away, I remembered some trifle of Janet’s that had been left in the conservatory; and, as I was in the hall at the time, ran hastily outside and round by the gravel to the door opening from the lawn, which was my shortest way to the conservatory from there.

Suddenly I stood quite still.  Paul was looking out of the library window, and Janet, ready for departure, came falteringly in and stood behind him.  He did not look towards her.  “Paul!” she whispered entreatingly; and although so low there was the utmost anguish in the tone:  “Paul.”  As though not knowing what she did, she raised her arm, standing behind him there, as if to shake hands.  Abruptly he wheeled round, with a face down which the great tears coursed, but awful in its pallor and sternness; and, taking no notice of her outstretched hand, pointed to the door.  Weeping bitterly, she swiftly turned and went.

I cannot describe the shock this terrible scene gave me.  It did not take half-a-dozen short moments to enact, but it represented, unmistakably, the blasting of two lives—­the lives of those dearest in all the world to me.

I do not know, I never knew, whether Paul saw me.  I think I must have become momentarily unconscious, and when I came to myself he was gone.

I sat where I was, weeping bitter tears—­bitter as Janet’s—­and thought of the little lassie in the dirty pink frock that had sung and swung about the stairs, and of the boy who had stood day-dreaming, looking up into the blue sky.  Sometimes I was wildly angry.  Whose fault was it?  Who was answerable for this?  If it was the young people’s own fault, someone ought to have looked after them better, ought to have prevented it.  No one, not even I, could help them now, that was the bitterest, bitterest part of it; no one and nothing—­save time, or death.