"Let's—do the—rest—now."
"Anne!" A lump rushed to Roger's throat and he could say no more. Then, hand in hand, like two children, they crossed the corridor to the judge's chambers.
In ten minutes it was over, witnessed by a stenographer and the janitor called in from the hall. The judge made his mechanical speech of congratulation, which neither heard nor waited for him to finish. Silent, they walked down the stairs and out into the sunny, dust-filled wind.
"What—what would you like to do?" Roger felt as if he had suddenly been left alone in a strange situation with a strange woman.
Anne wanted to cry. "Are—are—you sorry?" she demanded almost angrily.
"Why, sweetheart!" But the thing he had just done was touching Roger to a seriousness beyond his power to treat gayly.
"Only, we can't go away very well till to-morrow and——"
Anne tried to catch the words fluttering about her like bits of paper in the wind, but the realization that she was now married, that all the rest of her life she would come and go, eat and sleep, share the thoughts of the man beside her, paralyzed her power to think or move. She could not even look at Roger.
"I'm—going—back to work," she managed at last.
"You are not. Not for a single minute."