The younger girl bowed a meek head, and turned to her faith as a refuge, or, as Ethan would have said, an opiate. But the old helps seemed to have lost somewhat of their efficacy. She began to go to mass, and one day sought an interview with the Roman Catholic priest. A few months afterwards she was received into the Roman Church.
Val would not leave her sister while she was going through these phases, and forbade Ethan to come till she should send for him.
But Mrs. Gano had not been in her grave a year when Emmie herself made the final move that broke up the old home. How much religious fervor had to do with it, how much a sense of unfitness for the battle of life, how much a feeling in the gentle heart that she was delaying Val's happiness, no one ever knew. She bade her sister good-bye with many tears, turned her back upon the Fort, and entered the first year of her novitiate at the Convent of the Sacred Heart.
A week later, in early August, Val was married very quietly to her cousin, in the Church of St. Thomas. "But the real marriage was that evening on the river when we propitiated the Fates," she whispered, as they came down the church steps.
CHAPTER XXXII
They went abroad at once. At first, in a rhythm of rapture and of terror, the time went by, now with flying, now with faltering feet. But albeit living on the volcano's brink is possible to men—living there with fear is not. The fire still rages under foot, but the terror must burn out, or else the life.
It had been to Ethan a standing marvel that happiness—forgetfulness—had visited them so persistently even in these first months. In vain he said to himself, "Fool! be sure Nemesis keeps the score!" Of what avail that a man should tell himself Nemesis would exact the uttermost farthing for every care-free hour, when life, in the guise of the woman he loved, was luring him on from one day to the next, and the next, and the next?
April found them at Nice. They had come back to their hotel one night after the play, and Val had gone out on the balcony that opened off their sitting-room, declaring the night too glorious to waste indoors. Ethan followed her, and while the town went to sleep, they sat there in the moonlight, and talked of many things. In a moment of protest against the anodyne of gladness that he felt stealing into his blood, he burst out with something of his wonder at their frequent and utter forgetting of the shadow.