me?" she asked. "I thought you were keeping him away from
me, downstairs. Hasn't he even _come_?"

"The train is late," the mother said.

But Daphne was overwrought. She flung herself upon a chair, and
twisting herself so that her arms embraced its back and her face was
hidden, began to cry hysterically.

"There has been an accident," she sobbed, presently, lifting her head.
"Hamley has overturned the dog-cart in the dark; Jack has been pitched
out; there is no one to help,--and you all stand here! You all stand
here!"

She insisted that her brother should go at once on his bicycle to see
what was amiss. Her distress unnerved the boy, and softened him. He
lifted her from the chair, and put his arm round her and led her to the
door.

"You go to bed, Dapple-ducky," he said, calling her by the name he had
given her in childhood. "It's all right, dear. Don't you be a silly.
I'll go along at once and fetch him."

His stern resolve was shaken. If Jack Marston had come then he would
have relented; I think the marriage would have taken place.

But he did not come. He never came.

Halfway to the station Hugh Mavor met the dog-cart returning, the groom
alone seated in it. There had been an accident, he said; a couple of
carriages had run off the line and overturned. He had waited for the
surviving passengers to be brought in. The train bringing them had at
length arrived; Mr Marston was not among them.

The accident had happened ten miles down the line. Hugh got into the
dog-cart and drove to the scene of the disaster.

Mrs Mavor spent the night in Daphne's room. I awaited Hugh, sitting
alone by the drawing-room fire, when he returned at four o'clock in the
morning of what was to have been his sister's wedding-day. He came in,
carrying a florist's tin box in his hand, and I read the news in his
face before he spoke.

"Only three killed. He was one. I saw him. I thought I had to. It was
awful."

He sank into the chair where Daphne had sat, hid his face on its back
as she had done, while his shoulders heaved with painful sobbing. After
a few minutes he turned to me.

"We shall have to tell her," he said. "That is the next thing to do."

He got up, and with shaking fingers, not knowing, I think, that he did
so, pulled the string from the tin box, which lay on the table beneath
the lamp, pulled it open.

"Everything else in the carriage seemed to be in shivers--but this," he
said.

Inside, beneath the snowy wrap