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‘Not to you; but they would be strangers to me,’ said Hester, not provocatively, stating, merely, the fact that concerned her.

‘There would be your friends as well as ours—and ours will all be yours.’

‘A Registrar’s office is rather small for such a crowd; ask anybody you please, of course. I shall have one or two only.’

‘But a church has nothing to do with religious beliefs.’

‘Hasn’t it?’ Hester slightly smiled. ‘It’s that way of looking at a church—as though it were a wedding cake—that I don’t like. Perhaps I take churches more seriously than you do. I am the daughter of a parson,’ and Hester laughed, unmirthfully.

‘I only mean’—Monica knew that she had put herself in the wrong—‘that a church stands for a past and a future; what our ancestors believed, what our children may believe; it transcends completely any question of individual feeling. And many of us there would be believing;—quite enough to justify the occasion.’

She, too, smiled; but hers was the forced smile that seemed to reach down within her and wring her heart-strings as she felt its falsity. There was