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respectability; Aunt Chegwidden Carne, his second wife, bonneted and small-mouthed like a little black hen, and behind them four tall gangling youths, a selection from among Demelza's brothers.
    A silence had fallen on the company. Only the stream bubbled and a bullfinch chirped. The cavalcade reached the plank bridge and came across it with a clomp of hobnailed boots.
    Verity guessed the identity of the new arrivals and she left old Mr Treneglos and moved to Demelza's side. She did not know how she could help Demelza unless it was merely by being there, but in so far as she could give a lead to Francis and Elizabeth that she meant to do.
    Ross came quickly out of the house, and without appearing to hurry reached the bridge as Tom Carne came over.
    'How d'you do, Mr Carne,' he said, holding out his hand. 'I am grateful you were able to come.'
    Carne eyed him for a second. It was more than four years since they had met, and then they had smashed up a room before one of them ended in the stream. Two years of reformation had changed the older man; his eyes were clearer and his clothing good and respectable. But he still had the same intolerant stare. Ross too had changed in the interval, grown away from his disappointment; the content and happiness he had found with Demelza had softened his intolerance, had cloaked his restless spirit in a new restraint.
    Carne, finding no sarcasm, let his hand be taken. Aunt Chegwidden Carne, not in the least overawed, came next, shook his hand, moved on to greet Demelza. As Carne made no attempt to introduce the four gangling youths, Ross bowed gravely to them and they, taking their cue from the eldest, touched their forelocks in response. He found a strange comfort in the fact that none of them was the least like Demelza.
    'We been waiting at the church, maid,' Carne said grimly to his daughter. 'Ye said four o'clock and we was there by then. Ye'd no manner of right to do it afore. We was besting whether to go 'ome again.'
    'I said tomorrow at four,' Demelza answered him sharply. 'Aye. So yer man said. But twas our right to be 'ere the day of the baptizing, an' he said the baptizing was for today. Yer own flesh an' blood 'as more call to be beside you at a baptizing than all these 'ere dandical folk.'
    A terrific bitterness welled up in Demelza's heart. This man, who had beaten all affection out of her in the old days, to whom she had sent a forgiving invitation, had deliberately come on another day and was going to shatter her party. All her efforts were in vain, and Ross would be the laughing stock of the district. Already, without looking, she could see the laughter on the faces of Ruth Treneglos and Mrs Teague. She could have torn tufts from his thick black beard (showing streaks of grey now beneath the nose and under the curve of the bottom lip); she could have clawed at his sober, too-respectable jacket or plastered his thick red-veined nose with earth from her flower beds. With a fixed smile hiding the desolation of her heart she greeted her stepmother and her four brothers: Luke, Samuel, William and Bobby: names and faces she had loved in that far-off nightmare life that no longer belonged to her.
    And they, at any rate, were overawed, not least by their sister, whom they remembered a managing drudge and found a well-dressed young woman with a new way of looking and speaking. They grouped round her at a respectful distance, answering gruffly her metallic little questions, while Ross, with all that grace and dignity of which he was capable when he chose, was escorting Tom Carne and Aunt Chegwidden round the garden, inexorably introducing them to the others. There was a steely politeness in his manner which bolted down the reactions of those who were not used to exchanging compliments with the vulgar classes.
    As they went Tom Carne's eyes grew no more respectful at the show of fashion but harder and more wrathful at the levity these people seemed to consider suitable for a solemn day;