"My church has no ceremony: every minister in it has his own; and rather than have one of them write mine, I think I should rather write it myself: shouldn't you?"
"I think I should," he said, laughing.
He drew a little book out of his breast pocket: "Perhaps you will like this: a great many people have been married by it."
"I want the same ceremony that is used for kings and queens, for the greatest and the best people of the earth. I will marry you by no other!"
"A good many of them have used this," and he read to her the ceremony of his church.
When he finished neither spoke.
It was a clear summer afternoon. Under them was the strength of rocks; around them the noiseless growth of needful things; above them the upward-drawing light: two working children of the New World, two pieces of Nature's quietism.
II
It was the second morning after Marguerite's ball.
Marguerite, to herself a girl no longer, lay in the middle of a great, fragrant, drowsy bed of carved walnut, once her grandmother's. She had been dreaming; she had just awakened. The sun, long since risen above the trees of the yard, was slanting through the leaves and roses that formed an outside lattice to her window-blinds.