"Mustn't tell," smiled the little bride of Superstition with her finger at her lips. "If I told they might not come true!"
Very earnestly she hoped that those two wishes might come true. She thought of them again, presently, as she stood, there in church, a small, white-mist-clad figure, backed by the coloured window and the crimson altar. She had the kindly glances upon her of her uncle, of her tall girl-chum, and of Hugo Swayne—who wore a perfect morning coat with a white flower and grey trousers, admirably pressed by his man Johnson. Hugo, but for his Chopin stock, would have looked the very model of a prosperous and conventional bridegroom. He did, in fact, look far more like the popular conception of a bridegroom than did young Paul Dampier in his well-cut but ancient grey tweed suit.
—"The only togs I've got in the wide world," he'd confided to Gwenna, "except working clothes and evening things!"
She stood with her hand in his large, boyish one, repeating in her soft, un-English accent the vows that once seemed to her such a vast and solemn and relentless undertaking.
"To love, honour, and obey ... as long as we both shall live...."
It seemed now so little to have to promise! It seemed only a fraction of all that her heart gave gladly to the lord of it!
"Till Death us do part," she repeated quietly.
And it was then she thought of the two wishes. One was that Paul should be always as much in love with her as he was at that moment.
She was too young fully to realise the greater wisdom of her own second wish.