offered to the cousin--she came to spend Christmas under his roof
while still a spinster, on the tacit understanding that neither was a
subject for "nonsense" any more. Deb and Mrs Carey were close friends.
Deb was the godmother of the heir. The homelikeness of Wellwood was
intensified by her intercourse, while there, with English Redford and
the descendants of that brother with whom old Mr Pennycuick had been
unable to hit it off--humdrum persons, whose attraction for her lay in
their name and blood, and the fact that they could show her the arms
and portraits of her ancestors and the wainscotted room in which her
father was born. It was to Wellwood that she went to be married. From
the old home of the Careys she was driven to the old church of the
Pennycuicks, full of mouldering monuments to a nearly vanished race; it
was buried in its rural solitude, far from railways and
gossip-mongers and newspaper reporters, and the wedding was as quiet as
quiet could be. Guthrie was acting brother, and gave her away. He
never, of course, disclosed the secret that was his and Francie's,
honest brother as he longed to be; but perhaps, even had she known it,
and her own austere chastity notwithstanding, she might have been
broad-minded enough to judge him kindlier than is the wont of the sex
which does not know all, and have still held him worthy to be to her
the friend he was. As she knew him, she loved him sister-like, and
turned to him naturally when she needed a brother's services. And so it
was to him that she wrote first, at the end of the short wedding-day
journey--just to tell him that she and her bridegroom had arrived
safely, and that Claud was standing the fatigue much better than they
could have hoped.

She did not write to Frances until she had her husband on the high
seas. She did not write at all to Mary or Rose, not wishing them to
know of her marriage until she could personally 'break it' to them. It