Then, holding Mildred’s right hand in his, while the minister stood wonderingly aside, he said with clear, unshaken voice:
“I take thee, Mildred, to be my lawful, wedded wife, to love and to serve, to comfort and cherish, to honor and keep, so long as we both shall live; and thereto, God helping, I plight thee my troth.”
A deathly pallor had crept over Mildred’s face. Just then the last rays of the setting sun for a moment streamed into the little room, irradiating its bare walls, and transfiguring with magic light those two faces on which we were gazing with breathless silence.
Then, after a moment’s pause, Mildred with a great effort leaned an inch nearer, and gently taking Ralph’s brown hand in both her slender white ones, said, with blanched lips:
“I take thee, Ralph, to be my lawful, wedded husband, to love and to serve, to comfort and cherish, to honor and keep, so long as we both shall live; and thereto, God helping, I plight thee my troth.”
After the last words had died tremblingly away on Mildred’s lips, the clergyman at a sign from her lifted his voice in prayer, while Alice kneeled sobbing by the bedside, and over my eyes there came a mist. My senses reeled, and I remember no more.
Weeks afterward Alice told me that Mr. Lightfoot had gone away with a fatherly benediction, and a purse the richer by a thousand dollars for the marriage service which he did not perform.
The days went by, and I knew but little. The tall, white screen shut out everything from me. I was too weak to ask about Mildred, but I knew that she had not left us. Surely God had been merciful. She was still to live and love and bless the world.
At last came a day,—it was the first day of September, I recall,—the very day when we had planned to reach San Francisco on our return from the Alaskan trip which we had contemplated; the screen was removed, and Mildred and Ralph, still pale and wan, but with the glow of returning health lighting up their happy faces, sat beside me and whispered words of farewell.
“Oh, Mildred, you did not die, you are alive,” I sobbed weakly, too happy to keep the tears back.