"I am sure he would not, and they become you well. But still I like you best as I have known you best."
"I will doff them presently. But you are so like a queen that I did not like to come to you like a beggar."
In his hand he had brought the Prayer-book, with the quill in a certain place.
He stepped up to her and lifted her hand to his lips.
"You do not repent you of this we are about to do?"
"I shall never repent it," she said, with dancing eyes.
"Please God, and as far as in me lies, you shall never have cause to repent it.... We are here, our two selves, with none to witness this that we do but God.... We are doing what we believe to be right for our own great happiness and well-being.... It would suffice, I believe, for a Scots wedding, simply to declare ourselves man and wife. But I have thought it would please us both to do something more. We are not entering upon this new estate lightly or without due thought.... It will, I know, be to both our minds and comforting to both our hearts, to think that in our loneliness here we have done all we could to supply the deficiencies for which we are not to blame."
He spoke with very great emotion. She rejoiced in this fresh evidence of the heights and depths of his nature and his essential goodness of heart, though indeed she had not needed it.
Her great dark eyes, fixed on his, were abrim with happy tears.
"So," he continued, "We will read together the Form for the Solemnization of Matrimony in this Prayer-book, and then we will inscribe on the front leaf of it the fact that this day we have become man and wife. We will sign our names to it, and we can do no more to comply with man's law.... Is that your will, my dear?"