f parent and child.

But this Sunday wherein Lali received a shock. She did not know that the
banns for Marion's and Captain Vidall's marriage were to be announced,
and at the time her thoughts were far away. She was recalled to herself
by the clergyman's voice pronouncing their names, and saying: "If any of
you do know cause or just impediment why these two people should not be
joined together in the bonds of holy matrimony, ye are to declare it."
All at once there came back to her her own marriage when the Protestant
missionary, in his nasal monotone, mumbled these very words, not as if
he expected that any human being would, or could, offer objection.

She almost sprang from her seat now. Her nerves all at once came to such
a tension that she could have cried out. Why had there been no one there
at her marriage to say: "I forbid it"? How shameful it had all been! And
the first kiss her husband had given her had the flavour of brandy!
If she could but turn back the hands upon the clock of Time! Under the
influence of the music and the excited condition of her nerves, the
event became magnified, distorted; it burned into her brain. It was
not made less poignant by the sermon from the text: "Mene, Mene, Tekel,
Upharsin." When the words were first announced in the original, it
sounded like her own language, save that it was softer, and her heart
throbbed fast. Then came the interpretation: "Thou art weighed in the
balance and found wanting."

Then suddenly swept over her a new feeling, one she had never felt
before. Up to this point a determination to justify her child, to
reverse the verdict of the world, to turn her husband's sin upon
himself, had made her defiant, even bitter; in all things eager to
live up to her new life, to the standard that Richard had by manner and
suggestion, rather than by words, laid down for her. But now there
came in upon her a flood of despair. At best she was only of this race
through one-third of her parentage, and education and refinement and all
things could do no more than make her possible. There must always be in
the record: "She was of a strange people. She was born in a wigwam." She
did not know that failing health was really the cause of this lapse of
self-confidence, this growing self-depreciation, this languor for which
she could not account. She found that she could not toss the child and
frolic with it as she had done; she was conscious that within a month
there had stolen u