“What wedding?” said Andy, though he knew.
“Dick’s, of course,” said Mrs. Stamford, and she might just as well have said, “What a fool you are!”
“Why?” asked Andy, and he had a difficulty even in saying that.
“Because Millsby Church has been so injured by the gale that it cannot possibly be put right in time. Part of the steeple blown down. Roof broken in. I always told Mr. Banks that it would happen.”
“Of course,” said Andy, after a pause which he knew to be growing long and yet was almost powerless to end, “I shall be glad to help you in any way I can.”
“Then if you’ll come with me—I have Sims the head gardener waiting outside—we will go to the church at once and see about the decorations. I have arranged with Mrs. Atterton that we will help with them, as we are so near, though their gardener will decorate the chancel.”
Andy took the keys from their familiar place on the nail in the hall, and as he went up the path past Brother Gulielmus, he had, for a strange second, a feeling as if some voice outside had said, “Be a man. Keep a brave heart, my brother.”
Of course it could only be the association of ideas grown vivid through emotion, but it made Andy square his shoulders and give his best attention to the necessary arrangements for the ceremony.
“Really,” said Mrs. Stamford, when they had finished, “your advice has been quite invaluable. Poor Mr. Banks——”
“He has not been curate in a fashionable London parish,” said Andy grimly. “We’re used to arranging theatrical performances there.”
And that was the only sign he gave of the bitterness which underlay his ready interest in the decorations.
Mrs. Stamford glanced at her watch and caught up her gloves.
“No idea it was so late,” she said. “Dick is coming by the eleven train. We expected him yesterday, but he was delayed—diamonds not finished re-setting, and he wanted to bring them with him. I do hope he won’t miss the train; it starts so early from London.”
“Oh, he’ll turn up all right,” said Andy calmly—while all his being cried out, “Miss his train—when he is going to marry Elizabeth to-morrow!”
They were almost at the church door now, and Mrs. Stamford turned to give a last injunction about the music, when a queer, hoarse voice which neither of them recognised struck upon their ears, and they turned sharply round to see Mr. Stamford standing in the porch on the arm of his man-servant.