Then Michael met me at the gate at half-past ten.
'There's a little cottage high up on a Cornish cliff, Meg.'
'How interesting,' I said.
'It's rather a sweet place for a day or two.'
'Oh, really?'
'And after that a bit of sea, which will be smooth'—(but will it?)—'and a long journey, till we come to a little village where two men will be sitting on a wall waiting for me, and then the mountains for my honeymoon, my Paradiso!'
You see, I am to have a quite unusual wedding tour. There is to be no dallying with love beside a rippling and sequestered waterfall, alone with Michael, who, at intervals, would strain me to his heart. No, there will always be those two young men with us who are going to strain my muscles all the time. I am going up a 'chimney' for my honeymoon. I have had an ice-axe for a wedding present and a most amazing pair of boots If I love and honour Michael, and obey him and the other two young men, I may even go up the wrong side of a mountain some day! 'It all depends!'
Now I had not felt worried about these arrangements till that moment by the gate, but Michael's then unveiled my eyes. I understood all in a moment that here was the stark and awful tragedy of my life. The mountains were his honeymoon, the two young men—his bride. The cottage and the cliffs, the sea, the long journey?—less than the rust that never stained his ice-axe. His wife? Just a Cook's tour (personally conducted) to his bride—his two young men—his mountains—his honeymoon—his Paradiso.
But he learned there, by the gate, that an inferno comes for some before their paradiso. In a storm of indignation I declined to be his Cook's tour!
'All is over, Captain Ellsley.'