Just then Sidney joined them.
"Ready, dear?"
"Yes. If dad's through. Oh, there he is. All right, come on."
Passing through the French window Jerome saw Jean standing a little apart, the smile at Alice's flippancy touched with sadness at the thought of what Martha would have felt at having to "scratch round" for another minister who looked "like one of the Prophets after a good dinner."
In the six weeks of absence, Jerome had settled the matter of the concert night to his own satisfaction. Away from Jean, he had analyzed it thoroughly and was glad, by the time he had put a few hundred miles between them, that it had happened as it had. It would never happen again and it had taught him much. Now, as he saw her standing, a little lonely it seemed to him, with that look of mingled amusement and sadness on her face, he felt a deep tenderness, almost as if she were Alice, a tenderness which had in it no room for passion. He was crossing the room to stand beside her—Alice absolutely forbade being given away—when the minister opened his book and the short service of the Episcopal Church began. Jerome stood where he was, and after a moment forgot Jean.
Standing aside from the group of young people, all strangers, Jean listened and, as she listened, the room faded into the walls of the little western church at the foot of the Berkeley Hills. In the pew behind, Martha stifled her sobs and Elsie dabbed with surreptitious slaps at the fidgeting Tommykins.
What a dreary affair it had been. Jean felt again her rebellion and shame at the sordid ugliness of Martha's sobs and Elsie's whispered rebukes.
"Do you, Alice, take this man, to be your wedded husband ... to love, honor and obey, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?"
"I do."
She, too, had promised, firm in belief of herself, of Herrick, of any test the future might hold. And she had understood nothing, nothing at all. It was a terrible promise to make in one's youth, untried.