"You and I are going to get married by special licence," he told her, "the day after to-morrow."
CHAPTER VI
HER GUARDIAN'S CONSENT
The Reverend Hugh Lloyd, who was Gwenna Williams' only relative and guardian and therefore the person from whom consent might be asked if ever the girl wished to be engaged, sat reading The Cambrian News. He sat, over his breakfast eggs and tea, in the kitchen-sitting-room of his Chapel House. Inside, the grandfather clock ticked slowly but still pointed (as ever) to half-past two; and the cosy room, with its Welsh dresser and its book-shelves, still held its characteristic smell of singeing hearthrug. Outside, quiet brooded over the valley that fine August morning. The smoke from the village chimneys rose blue and straight against the larches of the hill-side. The more distant hills of that landscape were faintly mauve against the cloudless, fainter blue of the late-summer sky. All the world seemed so peaceful!
And the expression on the Reverend Hugh's face of a Jesuit priest under its thatch of bog-cotton hair was that of a man at peace with all the world.
True, there were rumours, in some of the newspapers, of some War going on somewhere in the world outside.
But it was a long way from here to that old Continent, as they called it! For the matter of that, it was a long way to London, where they settled what they were going to do about Germany....
What they were going to do about Welsh Disestablishment was a good deal more important, to a Welshman. There were some very good things about that in this very article. The Reverend Hugh had written it himself.