“For being attentive to a young lady who——”
“Kirk Bruce, to a T.”
“Went out without a revolver——”
“As you did yourself. I think,” concluded Raoul, “you had better give Miss Jeanie her ring back.”
“If I do,” said I, “I’m damned.”
10.
They were married the next day in the pretty little Episcopal church in Spartanburg, by the Bishop of Georgia. They left the same afternoon on their wedding journey back to “Old White” and the North. Miss Jeanie Bruce and I accompanied them—or rather, they us—as far as the junction station (I forget its name), where they met the east-bound train, and we were to keep on to Knoxville.
Jeanie’s sweet face was very pale, but her eyes were like deep wells—so deep now that they indeed “unravelled the coiled night and saw the stars by noon.” She had to sit by me now; but her silence appealed even to a blunted Northern sense of chivalry. I foresaw that I, too, should have to keep silence until I had brought her home to Knoxville. But not a day longer! Not an hour, I finally vowed.
But oh, the beauty of that immediate future! The long twenty hours’ journey after they left us at the junction—where she was under my protection, and no Kirk Bruce could say me nay! Even chivalry at such times is like a sordine on one harp-string—heart-string I had almost said. And one’s being is so resonant that the note of speech is hardly missed.
So, I had my two-hours’ day-dream, and then Mrs. Judge Pennoyer turned up on that east-bound train, as chaperone to bring us home.