It was completely still. It was very silent. There was the inkpot: there was the pen; there was the manuscript of her poem, broken off in the middle of a tribute to eternity. She had been about to say, when Basket and Bartholomew interrupted with the tea things, nothing changes. And then, in the space of three seconds and a half, everything had changed – she had broken her ankle, fallen in love, married Shelmerdine. There was the wedding ring on her finger to prove it. It was true that she had put it there herself before she met Shelmerdine, but that had proved worse than useless. She now turned the ring round and round, with superstitious reverence, taking care lest it should slip past the joint of her finger. ‘The wedding ring has to be put on the third finger of the left hand’, she said, like a child cautiously repeating its lesson, ‘for it to be of any use at all.’ She spoke thus, aloud and rather more pompously than was her wont, as if she wished someone whose good opinion she desired to overhear her.
