Frances noticed Durkin’s little wince at the obtrusion of this unlooked-for sordidness, though he glanced up and smiled at her reassuringly as he wrote in the register, “James Altman Durkin,” and waited for her to sign “Frances Edith Candler.”
The service, in some way, had utterly failed to impress Durkin as it ought. The empty seats of the chapel, with only one pew crowded with a little line of tittering, whispering schoolgirls, who had wandered in out of idle curiosity, the hurriedly mumbled words of the curate—he afterward confessed to them that this was his third service since luncheon—the unexpected briefness of the ceremony itself, the absence of those emblems and rituals which from time immemorial had been associated with marriage in his mind—these had combined to attach to the scene a teasing sense of unreality.
It was only when the words, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” were repeated that he smiled and looked down at the woman beside him. She caught his eye and laughed a little, as she turned hurriedly away, though he could see the tear-drops glistening on her eyelashes.
She held his hand fiercely in her own, as they rode from the little ivy-covered church, each wondering at the mood of ineloquence weighing down the other.
“Do you know,” she said, musingly, “I feel as though I had been bought and sold, that I had been tied up and given to you, that—oh, that I had been nailed on to you with horseshoe nails! Do you feel any difference?”
“I feel as though I had been cheated out of something—it’s so hard to express!—that I ought to have found another You when I turned away from the railing; that I ought to be carrying off a different You altogether—and yet—yet here you are, the same old adorable You, with not a particle of change!”
“After all, what is it? Why, Jim dear, we were married, in reality, that afternoon I opened the door to MacNutt’s ring and saw you standing there looking in at me as though you had seen a ghost!”
“No, my own, we were joined together and made one a million years ago, you and I, in some unknown star a million million miles away from this old earth; and through all those years we have only wandered and drifted about, looking for each other!”
“Silly!” she said happily, with her slow, English smile.
In the gloom of the taxi-cab, with a sudden impulsive little movement of the body, she leaned over and kissed him.