“It gives me rather more of a share in the proceedings,” he said,—“I always like to have something doing.”
The body of the church was hidden from our sight, but just before us rose the altar, lit by brazen candelabra which rested upon the altar cloth, hanging in heavy folds, and reached to the great mullioned window overhead, from which the Christ looks down in silent benediction. As we sat waiting, I breathed a silent prayer that I might be worthy, that our life together might be consecrated to loving service, that we might—Tom’s voice broke in on my half formulated thoughts.
“See the Alpha and Omega embroidered on the altar cloth?”
I nodded.
“And the Alpha of the whole thing came that day in Washington when you read the letter from ‘the man.’ Here’s a part of the Omega. The beginning and the end. How little you could dream of all that has come when you left your office to look up some stupid transports,—or Dorothy imagine it when she went down to standardize that radium. But the end will never be complete till we find ‘the man.’ While he roams the earth with his secret the world is never wholly safe.”
So the thread that had bound Dorothy and me together wove into our wedding hour. Our conversation ended there however, for at that moment a low bell tinkled, the first bars of the march began, and I started forward to meet my bride.
Quietly, reverently, happily, Dorothy and I took up our life together. Dorothy was never more beautiful, never more womanly and sweet than when she said “I do” in her low voice, and turned towards me with a look of loving confidence.
We had two weeks in the South, and then came back by special request to the Haldane house on the Long Island shore, where Tom had set up the wave-measuring machine in a laboratory which he had built on a bluff just above the beach and in which he was still at work on new ideas.
The morning after we arrived, Dorothy and I went out after breakfast to find Tom, who was bending over an inner cylinder of the machine, while the belt of metal quietly revolved.