evident that Nanna was preparing some horrid and tremendous rite.

She set her tray in its place by Edith's couch, and cleared a side table
which she had drawn into a central and conspicuous position. The three,
as if humouring a child in its play, feigned a profound ignorance of what
Nanna had in hand.

She disappeared, suppressed the giggling on the stairs, and returned,
herself in jubilee let loose. She carried an enormous plate, and on the
plate Anne's wedding-cake with all its white terraces and towers, and (a
little shattered) the sugar orange blossoms and myrtles of its crown. She
stood it alone on its table of honour, and withdrew abruptly.

The three were stricken dumb by the presence of the bridal thing. Nanna,
listening outside the door, attributed their silence to an appreciation
too profound for utterance.

They looked at it, and it looked at them. Its veil of myrtle, trembling
yet with the shock of its entrance, gave it the semblance of movement and
of life. It towered in the majesty of its insistent whiteness. It trailed
its mystic modesties before them. Its brittle blossoms quivered like
innocence appalled. The wide cleft at its base betrayed the black and
formidable heart beneath the fair and sugared surface. These crowding
symbols, perceptible to Edith's subtler intelligence, massed themselves
in her companions' minds as one vast sensation of discomfort.

As usual when he was embarrassed, Majendie laughed.

"It's the very spirit of dyspepsia," he said. "A cold and dangerous
thing. _Must_ we eat it?"