Suddenly the sister felt like a deserter. How could she leave the boys! Why was she doing it? To get married? It seemed unnatural, monstrous. Sholto had worked hard to get his present finished in time. It was a poker-worked toilet set – brushes, hand-mirror, boxes and tray – all with the same lily-of-the-valley design. She leaned out waving. She waved and waved till the train, curving, cut the platform from sight. Then in the corridor she opened Linnet’s present. He had given her his father’s gold signet-ring. It had been his since his fifteenth birthday, and though he never wore it they all knew he treasured it. It bore the Bannerman crest – pro patria under a naked demi-man holding a banner. Joanna put it on under her glove.

IX

The night before the wedding, Georgie cried a good deal, for she was sure Joanna didn’t properly love the man she was marrying, and marriage without love was the desecration of desecrations. Georgie came to sleep at the little temperance hotel in Bloomsbury where Juley had taken rooms, and she shared Joanna’s bed. Joanna’s replies to her questions confirmed her worst fears. Her sister was entering a loveless marriage.

But Georgie understood that it could not be stopped; and miserable as she was, it was Georgie who insisted on a white satin bow upon the coachman’s whip.

They had hired a carriage with two horses – Georgie said they must have two – to take them to the Registrar’s where Mario waited with his friend the Consul. The marriage was over in five minutes, and they all drove on to the station for lunch.

Joanna, in a blue travelling dress, the price of which she would not tell Georgie, and a little white, close-fitting hat, smote on her mother’s heart. She looked so unprepared, so lamentably young. Yet to the last she had sheered away from all maternal warnings and counsel.

The farewell was scrappy and confused. Juley, at the last moment, remembering injunctions about Aunt Perdy to whom she was sending presents, almost forgot to kiss Joanna goodbye. Georgie blubbered, but bore up. Mario was angry because there were other people in the carriage. But at this Joanna felt a secret relief.

Not till they were on the Dover packet did she come alive to the strange adventure. She had not been out of England before. The Channel boat was different from any steamer on the Clyde. The waters of the Channel rippled and shone, as she had never seen other waters ripple and shine. Near her some people chatted in French. The sailors ran about. There was a smell of biscuits and brandy, of ropes, of tar, of engines, of the sea – the smell of foreign travel.