“Perhaps,” she answered smiling. “But you would not like to think that your coming had lessened my pride and independence, and made me lazy and unselfreliant, would you? If I actually need assistance I will come to you, dear old boy.”
And so he had gone forth in search of a livelihood more than ever anxious for the ceremony to come off, and not a little eager to commence the new life of independence and hard work. St. John had a friend who knew everything. There is a difference between a man who knows everything and the man who thinks he does; St. John’s friend was the right sort, and he put him in the way of the very thing he was looking for. A photographer of the firm of Thompkins and Co, having recently dissolved partnership through the Co, setting up for himself was advertising through the regular channels for a new partner. St. John’s friend having some slight acquaintance with Thompkins introduced the two, and eventually St. John invested his capital and returned to the studio in triumph to inform Jill with much pride and satisfaction that he represented the Co in “Thompkins and Co.—photographers.”
Chapter Eleven.
“And now, Mrs St. John, I think we’ll go and have lunch,” Jill’s new husband remarked as they stood together outside the Registrar’s office, the sun shining brightly on the two faces, his quietly amused, hers a little grave and wondering at the importance of the now irrevocable step which they had taken. At the sound of her new name Jill smiled. “It will be our wedding breakfast,” she said.
“So it will. We’ll have fizz and go a buster—a man doesn’t get married every day. I didn’t sleep a wink last night, Jill for thinking of it.”
Jill hadn’t slept either. In morbid retrospection, half sweet, half painful, she had spent the night in the empty studio—empty because St. John had had every stick of hers removed to her new home, even to the remains of the Clytie that he had broken, and which had been carefully preserved among Jill’s other treasures as too sacred to be thrown away. She looked up at him, the memory of all his thoughtfulness adding an increased tenderness to the loving smile that chased the momentary sadness from her face.
“You’re a goose, my big boy,” she said slipping her hand through his arm as she spoke with a very unwonted display of affection. “And how nice to feel that you are my boy—my very own. No one can part us now, Jack; not all the spiteful machinations of the tyrannical, disagreeable, up-to-date parent can come between you and me, dear, nor alter the fact that we are man and wife.”
“That’s true,” replied St. John with mock resignation. “There’s no getting out of it edgeways; for there is a helpless finality about matrimony that carries its own conviction. Jill, my dear, you look uncommonly nice in that gown.”