Caldigate came over from Folking that morning attended by one John Jones, an old college friend, as his best man.  The squire was not at the wedding, but on the day before he was with Hester at The Nurseries, telling her that she should be his dear daughter, and at the same time giving her a whole set of wicked but very pretty worldly gauds.  ’Upon my word, my dear, he has been very gracious,’ said Mrs. Robert, when she saw them.  ’I quite envy the girls being married nowadays, because they get such pretty things.’

‘They are very pretty,’ said Hester.

‘And must have cost, I’m afraid to say how much money.’

’I suppose it means to say that he will love me, and therefore I am so glad to have them!’ But the squire, though he did mean to say that he would love her, did not come to the wedding.  He was, he said, unaccustomed to such things, and hoped that he might be excused.

Therefore, from the Folking side there was no one but John Caldigate himself and John Jones.  Of the Babingtons, of course, there was not one.  As long as there was a possibility of success Mrs. Babington had kept up her remonstrances;—­but when there was no longer a possibility she announced that there was to be an everlasting quarrel between the houses.  Babington and Folking were for the future to know nothing of each other.  Caldigate had hoped that though the ladies would for a time be unforgiving, his uncle and his male cousins would not take up the quarrel.  But aunt Polly was too strong for that; and he was declared to be a viper who had been warmed in all their bosoms and had then stung them all round.  ’If you will nurse a viper in your bosom of course he will sting you,’ said Aunt Polly in a letter which she took the trouble to write to the squire.  In reply to which the squire wrote back thus; ’My dear sister, if you will look into your dictionary of natural history you will see that vipers have no stings.  Yours truly, D. Caldigate.’  This letter was supposed to add much to the already existing offence.

But the marriage ceremony was performed in spite of all this quarrelling, and the mother standing up in the dark corner of her pew heard her daughter’s silver-clear voice as she vowed to devote herself to her husband.  As she heard it, she also devoted herself.  When sorrow should come as sorrow certainly would come, then she would be ready once again to be a mother to her child.  But till that time should come the wife of John Caldigate would be nothing to her.

She was not content with thinking and resolving that it should be so, but she declared her intention in so many words to her daughter.  For poor Hester, though she was proud of her husband, this was in truth a miserable day.  Could she have been induced to separate herself altogether from her mother on the previous night, or even on that morning, it would have been better, but there was with her that customary longing for a last word of farewell which has often