So here he was. The church smelled of damp stone and hothouse lilies, which someone had banked against the chancel step in great white drifts. The October light came grey through the clear glass of the east window, the old glass having been smashed by Cromwell's men and never replaced. Overhead in the tower the ringers were waiting; he could hear the creak of a rope now and then, and once a single bell let fall a half-swung note, quickly checked.
The rector, Mr. Furnival, a long, mild man with a long, mild face, had come out of the vestry twice to look down the nave toward the door and gone back in again.
"He is late," said a woman in the pew in front of Ivo. "The bridegroom is late. At his age, one would think he would make haste."
"Perhaps he has thought better of it."
"Perhaps she has thought better of it. Perhaps she has found a duke with a weaker chest."
Ivo looked down at the back of the woman's bonnet and considered, without heat, the practical difficulties of lifting a person out of a box pew by her collar. Then he looked across the nave and found Sir Digby Rendell watching him.
Sir Digby sat in the Ellerholt pew, because his wife was the old Duke's niece and he had always behaved as though that made it his pew. He was a big, handsome, high-coloured man of fifty-five, a magistrate and a Member of Parliament for a borough of eleven voters, and he wore the look of a man who expects shortly to be proved right and means to be gracious about it. Beside him Cordelia sat with her gloved hands knotted in her lap and her eyes on the floor.
Sir Digby inclined his head to Ivo, a small private bow between allies. Ivo did not return it. He found he did not want to be Sir Digby's ally in anything.
The church clock struck the three-quarters.
Somewhere outside, on the gravel, wheels stopped.
A stir went down the nave from the back, the particular rustling hush of a crowd turning its head. Ivo turned with it. The great west door stood open on the grey morning, and in it, alone, with no father and no bridesmaid and no one at all to lead her up the aisle, stood the bride.