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 CHAPTER XLIII

Basil Gregory's wedding day was warm and clear. June and England were at their best.

It was a sweetly pretty wedding. Every one said so.

And the girlish bride was prettier than her wedding—prettier than any mere picture could be; as pretty and as sweet as the June roses she wore, and very like them: pink and white, delicate, fair-haired, violet-eyed Alice Lee, the motherless daughter of the incumbent of the old gray vicarage in which Basil Gregory's mother had been born.

Homesick for the old days and the old ways, Florence Gregory had gone to Oxfordshire soon after their return to England, hoping to bathe and to heal her stained and torn spirit in the quiet of old places, the ointment of pure memories. She had failed. But she had made fast friends with her dead father's successor, and had gone back to the cordial hospice of her old home again and again in the three years that had elapsed since she had come from China. A year ago Basil had accompanied her, none too willingly, for a week-end, had stayed a month; hence these wedding bells!

Florence Gregory was an old woman now, old and limp. Robert Gregory was no longer proud of his wife. Her white hair was very beautiful, but he resented it, and it rasped and angered him that she had prematurely aged. He had married her, as he had loved her, for her