"That is all very well in theory, but I have never seen it work out well in fact," said the Rector of Trevalga, who made a third in the little group seated on the edge of the wide lawn, where sportive youth was playing tennis, in half a dozen courts, to the enlivening strains of a military band from Bodmin barracks.
"How thoroughly happy Christabel looks," observed another friendly matron to Mrs. Tregonell, a little later in the afternoon: "she seems to have quite got over her trouble about Mr. Hamleigh."
"Yes, I hope that is forgotten," answered Mrs. Tregonell.
This garden party was an occasion of unspeakable pain to Christabel. Her aunt had insisted upon sending out the invitations. There must be some kind of festival upon her adopted daughter's coming of age. The inheritor of lands and money was a person whose twenty-first birthday could not be permitted to slip by unmarked, like any other day in the calendar.
"If we were to have no garden party this summer people would say you were broken-hearted at the sad end of last year's engagement, darling," said Mrs. Tregonell, when Christabel had pleaded against the contemplated assembly, "and I know your pride would revolt at that."
"Dear Auntie, my pride has been levelled to the dust, if I ever had any; it will not raise its head on account of a garden party."
Mrs. Tregonell insisted, albeit even her small share of the preparations, the mere revision of the list of guests--the discussion and acceptance of Jessie Bridgeman's arrangements--was a fatigue to the jaded mind and enfeebled body. When the day came the mistress of Mount Royal carried herself with the old air of quiet dignity which her friends knew so well. People saw that she was aged, that she had grown pale and thin and wan; and they ascribed this change in her to anxiety about her niece's engagement. There were vague ideas as to the cause of Mr. Hamleigh's dismissal--dim notions of terrible iniquities, startling revelations, occurring on the very brink of marriage. That section of county society which did not go to London knew a great deal more about the details of the story than the people who had been in town at the time and had seen Miss Courtenay and her lover almost daily. For those daughters of the soil who but rarely crossed the Tamar the story of Miss Courtenay's engagement was a social mystery of so dark a complexion that it afforded inexhaustible material for tea-table gossip. A story, of which no one seemed to know the exact details, gave wide ground for speculation, and could always be looked at from new points of view.