“My dear Lawrence, you can safely leave it to me,” Miss Arden interrupted. She spoke with finality.

“As long as you tell her what she ought to know—”

“I shall do all that is necessary.”

Lawrence sighed with fast returning comfort of mind. “I expect you know best, Anne. I leave it to you.” He went to bed with the pleasant conviction of having performed a disagreeable duty. Incidentally, he had sloughed his responsibility. It rested on Anne’s shoulders now, and on her conscience.

Chapter Eleven

Elizabeth awoke on her wedding-morning with an odd feeling of mingled excitement and foreboding. As she lay-in bed she could see her new trunks, one open, with her evening-frocks, carefully folded in tissue-paper, bulging up out of the tray; the other locked and strapped, and with the initials E. R. shining on the side, in big, black letters. E. R.—Elizabeth Ramsay. How funny it sounded, and how unreal. She repeated it to herself, half-dreaming, and then fell to wondering how Stephen felt this morning; whether he too were excited, and whether he knew, or guessed, that underneath his bride-to-be’s excitement, vague melancholy lurked, and a certain shrinking.

Her mind wandered back to last night. She and Aunt Anne had laid the last things in those trunks, and had marked the last batch of handkerchiefs. And while she had packed that taffeta dance-frock that peeped above the side of the box Aunt Anne had talked, very quickly and mysteriously, of things that Elizabeth only partially comprehended.

Thinking it over now, Elizabeth subconsciously compared her aunt’s words to the pills she had been made to swallow in her childhood, smothered in raspberry jam. You had never tasted the pills: there was too much jam, but you had felt that they were there, and that they were nasty. Just so had Aunt Anne talked last night, telling you nothing, but hinting that you were about to enter on quite a new life, filled with new experiences, some of them not pleasant.

She had wanted to know more, and yet she had been thankful when Aunt Anne stopped. She had been shy, and red in the face, and she made Elizabeth shy, more withdrawn into herself.