“Oh, I say!”
“I sympathize with you and all that, of course; but I can only promise to love you; the honour and obedience——”
“Oh, throw them in to make up weight!”
“They are both conditional. But we can hope for the best.... Jack, I would not go through another marriage ceremony in a church even if there was no other way of getting married. The horrible mockery! Think what would have happened if that man whom I had promised before God’s altar to honour, love, and obey had come straight to me on getting out of gaol! Could he not have claimed me as his wife?”
“Not he. There is no law that could compel you to go with him.”
“Then there was no sacred obligation implied in the vows, as they call them; and every sensible person is aware of this, and yet the mockery of repeating the words is carried on day by day. Jack, I am willing to believe that God instituted marriage, but not the marriage service according to the Church of England.”
“I agree with you, my dearest; but for the sake of peace and quiet, and all that, don’t you say that to my mother.”
“Nothing will induce me. I am not given to forcing my views on this or any other subject on people who may have feelings or prejudices in favour of the conventional. If I were to suggest to my father a marriage before a registrar or in a British Consulate he would look on me as an outcast.”
“He goes back to the Heptarchy. Yes, what you say is quite right. This little affair of ours concerns our two selves only.”
She gave him her hand and he put it to his lips, but she could not help noticing that his eyes were fixed musingly upon a promising gooseberry bush. She wondered if he was considering how he was to break the news to his mother; or was he wondering how she was to break the news to her father? Either the one problem or the other would, she knew, entail a fair amount of musing.