Judith was less confident of the satisfactory end of all things. She was, in fact, exceedingly indignant that an engagement so entirely advantageous from all practical points of view should be broken off; "simply to gratify Papa's imbecile prejudices!" she declared, with her usual emphasis. "Christian, you were a fool to mind what he said or did. _He_ wouldn't have died! Not a bit of him! Of course, Mother has got to agree with him--that's what he married her for!"
"Don't tire me, Judy, please," Christian would say, serenely. "It's all over now. These discussions only weary me. I assure you my philosophy is quite equal to the strain!"
"If that's the case, I don't know why you should look like a dying ghost!"
Judith had never entirely comprehended her younger sister, and she found her, as she said with indignation to the concurring Bill, absolutely dark and inscrutable over the whole affair.
"I know it's hit her hard, but nothing will make her admit it. I detest Spartan Boys!" said Judith.
The Spartan Boy in question, though aware of her sister's ardent desire to investigate her wounds, had no intention of removing the cloak that covered them. She wrapped it close about her, so close that Lady Isabel, while unable to stifle a motherly regret for the wedding that might have been, thanked heaven that Christian had not "really cared"; so close that even Judith said that, since Christian had not been hit too hard, though she regretted the _coup manqué_ she personally found some consolation in the fact that she would not be called upon to make apologies for the political aberrations of her brother-in-law.
The polling day came, and passed with but little excitement.
"You wouldn't har'ly know it," said a voter, who had returned to his normal avocations after a morning wasted, as he considered, in the task of recording his vote. "There was a few men drunk in the town. Which won is it? Bedad, they dunno yet. Father Sweeny it was marched in the Pribawn boys. Faith, he had them well regulated. Very nate they marched, very nate entirely. They never were in such rotation!"
The voter bent melancholy and slightly bloodshot eyes upon Christian, and awaited her reply.
Christian, with her usual miscellaneous company of dogs, was on her way to visit a woman whose husband had died not long before. Her way took her along the banks of the Broadwater, and during one of the frequent pauses, necessitated by the investigations into the private affairs of water-rats and others, made by her companions, she and Peter Callaghan had exchanged greetings. He and Christian had fallen into talk, with the absence of formality that is, perhaps, peculiar to intercourse between his class and hers. He leant upon his scythe, and discoursed seriously and courteously. He wore a soft, slouched black hat, that did not wholly conceal his thick and curly hair, in which there was scarcely a grey strand, though he was, as he told Christian, the one age with her father. His white flannel jacket was wrapped round him, its skirts pushed under the band of his brown frieze trousers. A red wisp of rag was knotted round his middle, and held all together. His pale grey and wistful eyes looked at Christian from above a tangled thicket of grizzled moustache and beard. He suggested almost equally, a conventional Saint Joseph and a stage-brigand--a brigand, as it might be, who had joined the Salvation Army. "As old as I am," he returned, dreamily, to the affair of the morning, "I stepped it away with them!"