Caroline, indeed, was having to make a few adjustments on her own account. The distressed and uncertain Beatrix who had come sobbing to her on the night after her engagement, and had come closer to her sister's heart than ever before, was distressed and uncertain no longer, and had no need of her now, except as a recipient for love's raptures. It was 'Dick, Dick, Dick,' all the time. It spoke well for Dick's quality that Beatrix's family liked him as well at the end of his few weeks' engagement as they had at the beginning. It was he who kept up for them the sense of somebody added to it instead of somebody being taken away. 'Head over ears' as he was, and showed himself to be, he still showed them, whenever Beatrix allowed him the opportunity, that his reception among them added and would further add to the satisfactions of his life. It was not only to be just him and Beatrix, though the bliss to be gained from just him and Beatrix was at present almost beyond his power to grasp. It seemed also to be beyond Beatrix's power to grasp for the time being. She had removed herself from them in spirit, already, and had told Caroline that what she should really like, for the first few years of her marriage, would be for Dick to be ordered to the Pacific, and for herself to inhabit an island to which he could pay occasional visits, leaving her to think about him all alone in the intervals.
Grafton had a moment with her alone just before the ceremony. All the guests were in the church, from which the drone of the organ came across to them, standing in the hall until the clock should strike the hour. The house was empty and strangely quiet. They would have to walk across the few carpeted yards that lay between it and the church between packed masses of neighbourly and intensely sympathetic spectators; but they were waiting just inside the doorway where they could neither see nor be seen.
"Well, I'm going to give you up, my darling," he said. "I shan't have you alone again before I go. Give me one more kiss all to myself."
She lifted her veil carefully, and held up her sweet, happy face for his kiss. "Mind my hair, Dad," she said.
The church clock struck. "Now we'll go over," he said. "You're not nervous, are you?"