"I wasn't quite sure—thought I might have made a mistake. Away back near the door as we came in I caught sight of a chap who reminded me of March. But I never saw him before in London togs, you know, and it was dark in the church, with all that rain coming down outside. I couldn't tell for certain, it seemed so dashed improbable that he should be there. Even if he was in London, he wouldn't have been likely to get a card——"
"A card, indeed! Do you think any one with eyes in his head would ask Eagle March to show a card?"
"Well, anyhow," Tony defended himself, "why should he want to poke his nose in there? I judged him by the way I should feel, supposing it was you being spliced to some other fellow. I'd sooner be at the North or South Pole than have to watch it done, unless I could bounce out with an impediment why you shouldn't lawfully be joined together."
"I can think of reasons why a man might—might steel himself to see a woman he'd loved married to another man," I said; though in truth, I couldn't see distinctly, and I wondered if the day would come when the mystery of Eagle's presence at Diana's wedding would clear itself up. There was just one thing I could count on, though! It would never be from my trying to find out, but only when, and if, Eagle wished me to know. Meanwhile, I trusted him as always, and hardly needed to be told that the man in the back seat at St. George's hadn't flaunted himself in a conspicuous position.
"He was wedged in between two women's hats," Tony went on. "I'd never have spotted him, if I hadn't been rubber-necking at the crowd, sort of counting scalps. That's not done by brides and grooms in our class of life, so March might have felt as safe as a hermit crab, as far as giving the willies to Lady Di or Vandyke was concerned. But just when I was rubbering, he happened to shove his head forward between hats to squint at you."
"Oh, Tony!" I couldn't help breaking in. "He was looking at me?"
"That's the way it struck me. But the ladies with the hats were after the same thing, so they closed their ranks in front of March's nose, and swamped him. That's why I didn't get the chance to make sure whether it was he or his double. I rubbered some more, to see, but there was only a massed formation of hats where the face had been. There's nothing like hatpins to drive a man to the wall."
I shivered a little with the same electric thrill which had passed through me in church. What a soulless thing I had been not to know, despite a barrier of a hundred hats, by instinct whose eyes had called mine. But Tony was going mildly on.
"That's all, about the church," he said. "March must have been one of the first to get out, or he wouldn't have been on the stage in time for the next act. Sounds like a kind of melodrama now, doesn't it? Act one, scene one, inside St. George's, Hanover Square; the wedding. Scene two, outside the church door. Only, in a melodrama, the bridegroom would be the hero, and the other fellow the villain. There's no villain in this play."
"Oh, isn't there?" I sneered. "We won't argue the question, though. I suppose the new motor car didn't come after all, as I hear things about runaway horses."