And, though nothing had been said between them, each knew that they shared the wish and the intention.

Her boxes were packed and locked—all packed, all locked, but the one into which her wedding white would be laid when she came back from church to-morrow. All that he had to say to her, advice, careful words about marriage and about India, some of it said for himself, some said in her mother’s stead, assurances that he would do capitally, capitally without her, promises to neglect neither her collie nor her carnations—all this had been said. None of it need be said again. Nothing should be allowed to mark this day from the many other good days they had shared together—except that each had told the parlor-maid privately that they would be at home to no one to-day—if any one had the ill tact to call; and as for the villagers, well, if any parishioners were in sudden trouble or sickness they must shift with the curate for once.

Not even Antony Crespin was to have admittance to-day, Lucilla had told him, and Crespin had laughed, and understood, with a tender look in his pleasant eyes, and had promised obedience with a cheerful “Right-o!”

The girl gave her father his coffee, and he gave her her kidneys.

She teased him a little when his cup came back the second time, and he retorted with a reminder of what it probably had cost when she helped herself to a second peach.

For more than an hour they strolled in the garden, as they always did when it was fine, and often, though more briskly and briefly, when it rained. They studied the roses and appraised the peas, counted the chickens just hatched—one perking about with a white bubble of shell still on its soft yellow back—praised the red wealth of the strawberry beds, shook their heads at a pear tree’s blight; but nothing was said of that they would not do it together again. All over the garden they wandered, her hand on his sleeve, or his on hers; but they did this almost every day.

When they went in he read his paper and she read hers.

After lunch they went back into the garden, he with a book, she with some sewing, and under the big cedar just outside the drawing-room’s open French window he sat in the big garden chair and read aloud, while she sat on the big bench and worked.

She played to him after tea. Then he read her the sermon he’d finished the night before while she and Antony had roamed the garden, and Lucilla made a suggestion or two—as she often did, more because she knew he liked her to than for anymore critical reason—and one suggestion he liked and incorporated, and one he disdained and rejected.

They had a fire in the hall that night, as they always did when its heat possibly could be borne. He won the game of cribbage; he usually did. Then she sat on the wide hearth-curb, leaning back against the ingle-nook’s paneling, her palms behind her head, and he lounged in his great cushioned chair, and their lazy talk moved back and forth from grave to gay.

The grandfather’s clock struck eleven. The Vicar got up and wound it, she standing beside him. Then without a word he kissed her goodnight, and patted her shoulder, and she kissed him, and said, “Till breakfast, Daddy. Remember to put this light out,” and went up the broad, old stairs, her pale dinner-gown trailing softly behind her. And her father stood and watched her—not moving until he had heard her bedroom door close.

Lucilla Reynolds closed her door—alone with the thoughts that such girls think on such nights.

And the man sat alone by the fire till it died.

CHAPTER III

Out on the ocean Lucilla Crespin missed her father more than he, alone now in the vicarage, missed her. He had been bereaved too often to feel overwhelming or insupportable shock from bereavement, and he was at home with his house, his books, his garden, his people, his usual work and his usual pastimes, with his church and his churchyard—and, above all, at home with himself.

Lucilla was scarcely at home yet with her new self—that was the chief difference—and she was out on the new, unbeaten paths now, crossing the wide world, alone on the ocean, alone for the rest of the long years to come with a stranger—a devoted and perfectly charming stranger, who loved her amazingly, and whom she loved excitingly—but a stranger. She had felt so closely acquainted with her lover, even before he had spoken his love, but she found that she felt oddly and shyly unacquainted with her husband. It was fascinating, the queer strangeness she felt, and it made the smallest, ordinary, everyday things wonderful, almost hairbreadth-escape adventure—changing her shoes, fastening a blouse, winding her watch, washing her hands. But it was a strangeness. Antony was wonderfully good to her, beautifully considerate. She found something new to like in him every day, and discovered, almost as often, some unexpected trait or attainment to admire. She told him so shyly one evening, and he laughed with his face against hers.

“‘’Tis not a year or two shows us a man,’” he told her teasingly.

And, “So I begin to suspect,” his wife retorted.

She was very happy. The ocean and the sky above it did not seem large enough to hold her happiness; and, as for her own heart, it ached sometimes with the throb and the crowding of her hew joy. But she missed her father sorely, and each mile farther from England she missed him the more.

The boat was full of Anglo-Indians, of course, a few going out for the first time to take up new appointments, boys with their first commissions, men exchanging into Indian regiments, civil servants; but for the most, service folk and civil servants returning from leave. Lucilla noticed that they grumbled a deal at the heat and the “grind” they were going back to, but it seemed to her as she listened, keenly interested in even stray words that might tell her something of the new world in which she was going to live, that their grumbling was more a convention than a sincerity, and that they one and all were looking forward to India as what one happy-faced subaltern frankly called it, “a jolly good spree—what.” There were two or three globe-trotters aboard, an isolated and cold-shouldered missionary, and three or four business men. But these scarcely tinged the gathering, for none of them in the least penetrated into the “service” fold. It was almost a secret society the “service” people formed, she found; and certainly a jealously kept and guarded caste, and the army people sat on the higher seats.

If Mrs. Crespin was proud of her good-looking, soldierly husband, Captain Crespin was openly vain of his tall, handsome, girlish wife. And because he was vain of her he genially encouraged the acquaintance that soon buzzed about her.

The women admired her frocks, and the men admired her eyes and the way she walked, and both women and men liked her for her fresh girlishness. And, if some of the women envied her it, not one of them did it cattishly; and several, already sallowed from long Indian years, pitied her too, knowing that what India had done to their skins it probably would do to hers. And it takes a very sour woman, and a woman a little bad at core, to feel unkindness towards a bride.

Lucilla Crespin looked younger than her twenty years, and, tall as she was, securely as she carried herself, girlishness was her most instantly and insistently obvious point. Many a country priest’s motherless daughter—especially an only daughter—looks and seems very much older than her years. But in no sense had Mrs. Crespin ever been “her father’s curate,” or the villagers’ “mother.” Parochial