It was a haggard and weary-looking bride that presented herself to the expectant bridegroom the next morning. The great circles under her eyes told the story of a sleepless night. But nothing in Taylor's manner betrayed that he noticed that she was looking otherwise than as usual.
While she was dressing, Nora had come to a final decision. Quite calmly and unemotionally she would explain the situation to him. She would point out the impossibility, the absurdity even, of keeping an agreement entered into, by one of the parties at least, in hot blood, and thoroughly repented of, on later and saner reflection. In the remote event of this unanswerable argument failing to move him, she would appeal to his honor as a man not to hold her, a woman, to so unfair a bargain. She had even prepared the well-balanced sentences with which she would begin.
But as she stood with her cold hand in his warm one, he forestalled her by exhibiting, not without a certain boyish pride, the marriage license and the plain gold band which was to bind her. If these familiar and rather commonplace objects had been endowed with some evil magic, they could not have deprived her of the power of speech more effectively.
Without a protest, she permitted herself to be led to the waiting carriage, provided in honor of the occasion. It seemed but a moment later that she found herself being warmly embraced by a motherly looking woman, who, it transpired, was the wife of the clergyman who had just performed the ceremony.
From the parsonage they drove directly to the station.
CHAPTER XI
The journey had seemed endless: it was already nightfall when they arrived at the town of Prentice, where they were to get off and drive some twelve miles farther to her new home. And yet, endless and unspeakably wearying as it was, her heart contracted to find that it was at an end.
She realized now how comfortable, even luxurious, her trip across the Continent had been by comparison. Then, she had traveled in a Pullman. This, she learned, was called a day-coach. Her husband did everything in his power to mitigate the rigors of the trip. He made a pillow for her with his coat, bought her fruits, candies and magazines from the train-boy, until she protested. Best of all, he divined and respected her disinclination for conversation. At intervals during the day he left her to go into the smoking-car to enjoy his pipe.
The view from the window was, on the whole, rather monotonous. But it would have had to be varied indeed to match the mental pictures that Nora's flying thoughts conjured up for her.