While Marise was away, Garth opened the folded scrap of paper that Zélie Marks had slipped into his hand, and read the line she had pencilled.
"For goodness' sake don't be married in those awful best clothes of yours that you wore Sunday. Put on the uniform of the Guards, and look a regular man."
He was in no mood for laughing, yet he grinned. "And look a regular man!" ... Girls were queer. As if it would matter to Marise what he wore! But—well, hang it, why shouldn't he make her notice him? She would do that if he turned up in uniform. And wasn't that what he wished to look in her eyes, "A regular man"?
He'd made up his mind to take Zélie's tip, when suddenly he remembered that Marise and he would not be married in church. They'd walk into some parson's parlour, and the knot would be tied there. He couldn't get into his uniform for a home-made affair like that.
Garth had gone no further than this when Marise came back, chaperoned by Mums.
"My mother makes one stipulation," the girl announced. "That the wedding shall be in a church. She's picked up English ideas, and thinks anything else 'hardly respectable.' Though I should have thought for that reason it would be more appropriate! However, I don't care. Do you?"
"Not a da—not a red cent," said Garth.
Two minutes later he had gone to buy a marriage license, engage the services of a clergyman—and a church.
Marise changed her dress. She would not wear white, like a real bride. That would be sacrilege, she said; and compromised by putting on her favourite blue. But it was the oldest dress she owned; and she had intended giving it to Céline.
The girl wished she were pale. But that could be arranged. And she was arranging it with powder when the bell of the telephone rang.