the buttons down the back of her bodice, and almost the last filial
duty Miriam did before entering on her new life was to close that
gaping orifice for the eleventh time. Her bonnet was small and
ill-balanced, black adorned with red roses, and first it got over her
right eye until Annie told her of it, and then she pushed it over her
left eye and looked ferocious for a space, and after that baptismal
kissing of Mr. Polly the delicate millinery took fright and climbed
right up to the back part of her head and hung on there by a pin, and
flapped piteously at all the larger waves of emotion that filled the
gathering. Mr. Polly became more and more aware of that bonnet as time
went on, until he felt for it like a thing alive. Towards the end it
had yawning fits.

The company did not include Mrs. Johnson, but Johnson came with a
manifest surreptitiousness and backed against walls and watched Mr.
Polly with doubt and speculation in his large grey eyes and whistled
noiselessly and doubtful on the edge of things. He was, so to speak,
to be best man, _sotto voce_. A sprinkling of girls in gay hats from
Miriam's place of business appeared in church, great nudgers all of
them, but only two came on afterwards to the house. Mrs. Punt brought
her son with his ever-widening mind, it was his first wedding, and a
Larkins uncle, a Mr. Voules, a licenced victualler, very kindly drove
over in a gig from Sommershill with a plump, well-dressed wife to give
the bride away. One or two total strangers drifted into the church and
sat down observantly far away.

This sprinkling of people seemed only to enhance the cool brown
emptiness of the church, the rows and rows of empty pews, disengaged
prayerbooks and abandoned hassocks. It had the effect of a
preposterous misfit. Johnson consulted with a thin-legged,