'Weddings are not what they were, Martha.'

'Bride to groom,' said Martha, who always read the local weddings: 'a
one-eyed cat; a foolish rabbit as'd be better in a pie; an ill-contrived
bird; and a filthy smelly fox!'

Mrs. Marston relaxed her dignity so far as to laugh softly. She decided
to give Martha a rise next year.




Chapter 17


Hazel sat on a large flat gravestone with Foxy beside her. They were
like a sculpture in marble on some ancient tomb. Coming, so soon after
her strange moment of terror in the quarry, to this place of the dead,
she was smitten with formless fear. The crosses and stones had, on that
storm-beleaguered hillside, an air of horrible bravado, as if they knew
that although the winds were stronger than they, yet they were stronger
than humanity; as if they knew that the whole world is the tomb of
beauty, and has been made by man the torture-chamber of weakness.

She looked down at the lettering on the stone. It was a young girl's
grave.

'Oh!' she muttered, looking up into the tremendous dome of blue, empty
and adamantine--'oh! dunna let me go young! What for did she dee so
young? Dunna let me! dunna!'