Edith sighed and closed her eyes, resting in the comfort of Charlotte’s parlor. “Well, I suppose Elinor must know what she’s about. She hated Hugh Sterling more’n you did, so if she can marry him…”

“He probably compromised her.”

That earned Charlotte a throw pillow to the head, even as Edith laughed about the idea. “She’d have torn his limbs from his body had he tried any such thing, and ye ken it well!”

“I know, I know,” Charlotte moaned as she propped the pillow behind her head. “It’s only distressing that Elinor Asheley has found herself what she considers to be a suitable match before I have.”

“Aye, I can see how that would trouble you,” Edith allowed, “but, in all fairness, lass, I dinna think you’ve really looked all that hard.”

Charlotte looked rather defiant for a moment, then slumped back in defeat. “Perhaps not. It’s all become a bit of a farce now. A game I play to amuse myself amid the tedium.”

Edith heard true notes of sadness in her friend’s voice and smiled with some sympathy. “I canna speak for all marriages, as ye well ken, but I believe that for the best marriages, you have to be willing to give of yourself in some way. Are you prepared to do that for any man?”

The thought seemed to strike Charlotte, and she looked quite pensive for a moment. “I don’t know,” came the hesitant response. “It never occurred to me that that would be how it should go.”

“Nor I,” Edith murmured, memories racing through her brain with painful clarity. “But it is worth considering.”

“Hmm,” was all that Charlotte said.

Nothing else was said for a moment, and Edith felt herself relax in the solitude.

“I’ll consider it some other time,” Charlotte said with a sleepy yawn. “Right now, I only want a respite and to dream of tripping Hugh Sterling as he walks to the front of the church on his wedding day.”

Edith snickered again as she pictured the scene Charlotte described. “That would be a sight to behold.”

“It would indeed.”

The picture of Elinor’s wedding shifted, morphed, and turned into another wedding day; one with far less amusement.

Faces flashed in her mind, all bearing the same look of resignation. She heard someone crying, but she couldn’t find the source of the tears. A veil fell before her face, faded lace that was yellowed with age, and the sounds of tears grew ever louder.

She was moving, gliding up the aisle, even as she tried to turn back.

She couldn’t do so, couldn’t move. Her arm was held fast, and she was dragged forward.

“Ye’re not getting awee,” her father’s gravelly voice growled in her ear. “Succumb, and say ‘I do’, an’ we can all get along wi’ our lives.”

“Please,” she heard herself whisper. “Please.”