“I want to say something,” she began, raising her voice. “It’s all my fault, you know. I did it. I persuaded Jack one evening, here in this very room—and it was awfully hard to persuade him, I assure you! He didn’t like it in the least. He said it wasn’t a perfectly fair and honest thing to do. But I made him see it differently. I’m not sure that I was right. You see, we should have been married, anyway, as it’s turned out, because papa’s been so nice about it in the end. That’s all I wanted to say.”
There was probably no malice in her diplomatic allusion to her father. The only person who smiled at it was Mrs. Ralston.
“Except,” added Katharine, by an afterthought, “that the reason why we did it was because we wanted to be sure of getting each other in the end.”
“Well,” said Hamilton Bright, who was very red, “I suppose the next thing to do is to congratulate you, isn’t it? Here goes. Jack, I’m sorry I slated secret marriages the other day. You see, one doesn’t always know.”
“No,” observed Mrs. Lauderdale, who had her arms around her daughter’s neck. “One doesn’t—as Ham says.”
“That’s all right, Ham,” said John Ralston. “I didn’t mind a bit.”
But Hamilton Bright minded very much, in his quiet way, for he had played a losing game of late, and the same hour had deprived him of all hope of marrying Katharine, faint as it had been since she had so definitely refused him, and of all prospect of ever getting a share of the Lauderdale fortune. But he was a very brave man, and better able than most of those present to bear such misfortunes as fell to his lot. As for marrying, he put it out of his thoughts; and so far as fortune was concerned, he was prosperous and successful in all that he undertook to do himself, unaided, which is, after all, the most satisfactory success a man can have in the long run. The right to say ‘I did it alone’ compensates for many fancied and real wrongs. And that was something which Hamilton Bright had very often been able to say with truth. But his love for Katharine Lauderdale had been honest, enduring and generally silent. Never had he spoken to her of love until he had fancied that his friend John Ralston had no intention, nor she, either, of anything serious.
It was with the consent and approval of all her family that Katharine entered upon her married life at last, after having been secretly and in name the wedded wife of John Ralston for more than five months. The world thought it not extraordinary that there should be no public ceremony, considering the recent decease of Robert Lauderdale and the shockingly sudden death of Walter Crowdie. The Lauderdales, said the world, had shown good taste, for many reasons, in having a private wedding. Having always lived quietly, it would have been unbecoming in them to invite society to a marriage of royal splendour, when he who had left them their wealth had not been dead two months. On the other hand, the union of forty millions with twenty could hardly have been decently accomplished by means of two carriages from the livery stable and a man from the greengrocer’s. The world, therefore, said that the Lauderdales and the Ralstons had done perfectly right, a fact which pleased some members of the tribe and was indifferent to others. The only connections who were heard to complain at all were the three Miss Miners, whose old-maidenly souls delighted in weddings and found refreshment in funerals.
And the only person whom Katharine missed, and cared to miss, amongst all those who congratulated her was Paul Griggs. She did not see him, after they had met on the stairs of the house in Lafayette Place, for a long time. During the summer which followed the announcement of her marriage, she heard that he was in the East again—a vague term applied to Cairo, Constantinople and Calcutta. At all events, he was not in New York, but had taken his weary eyes and weather-beaten face to some remote region of the earth, and gave no further sign of life for some time, though a book which he had written before Crowdie’s death appeared soon after his departure. Katharine received one letter from him during the summer—a rather formal letter of congratulation upon her marriage, and bearing a postmark in Cyrillic characters, though the stamp was not Russian, but one she had never seen.