“That does not seem a very difficult matter,” he said, when she had finished. “If a man and a woman, unwed and outside the prohibited degrees, appear before me to be married, I marry them, and once the ring has passed and the office is said, married they are till death or the Pope part them.”
“And suppose that the man thinks he is marrying another woman, Father?”
The priest shrugged his shoulders.
“He should know whom he is marrying; that is his affair, not the Church’s or mine. The names need not be spoken too loudly, my daughter.”
“But you would give me a writing of the marriage with them set out plain?”
“Certainly. To you or to anybody else; why should I not?—that is, if I were sure of this wedding fee.”
Inez lifted her hand, and showed beneath it a little pile of ten doubloons.
“Take them, Father,” she said; “they will not be counted in the contract. There are others where they came from, whereof twenty will be paid before the marriage, and eighty when I have that writing at Seville.”
