Mrs. Stone paused at the door, knocked, and was admitted by Selina’s mother, who took her visitor at once into the parlour on the left hand, where a table was partly spread for supper.  On the ‘beaufet’ against the wall stood probably the only object which would have attracted the eye of a local stranger in an otherwise ordinarily furnished room, a great plum-cake guarded as if it were a curiosity by a glass shade of the kind seen in museums—square, with a wooden back like those enclosing stuffed specimens¹ of rare feather or fur.  This was the mummy of the cake intended in earlier days for the wedding-feast of Selina and the soldier, which had been religiously and lovingly preserved by the former as a testimony² to her intentional³ respectability in spite of an untoward⁴ subsequent circumstance, which will be mentioned.  This relic⁵ was now as dry as a brick, and seemed to belong to a pre-existent civilization.  Till quite recently, Selina had been in the habit of pausing before it daily, and recalling the accident whose consequences had thrown a shadow over her life ever since—that of which the water-drawers had spoken—the sudden news one morning that the Route had come for the ---th Dragoons, two days only being the interval⁶ before departure; the hurried consultation⁷ as to what should be done, the second time of asking being past but not the third; and the decision that it would be unwise to solemnize matrimony in such haphazard⁸ circumstances, even if it were possible, which was doubtful.