“You will hear the choir boys at any rate as they march in procession around the grave,” pursued Mrs. Preston, raising her parasol again. “I don’t suppose there will be a soul there but ourselves. Well, I put on my best bonnet, anyway, out of respect—I know you will both be glad when I’m gone, although you’re too polite to say so.”
She relaxed into a quizzical smile as she regarded them. “Well, good-by.”
“Thank Heaven! she’s gone at last,” said Norton with boyish petulance, as they watched her disappear behind the evergreens that bordered the churchyard. “What possessed her to give us so much of her society just now—the very wrong moment, wasn’t it, dear? She has left me only a quarter of an hour before the noon train to town, and I’ll not be back until Monday, you know, this time. To think that I shall be working for you now, Milly—for a sweet girl in a blue dress, with a dimple in one cheek and long brown lashes that droop lower and lower as I—oh, you darling!” They both laughed in joyously blissful content.
“Shall I put the ring on now?” he asked after a few moments. “Stand up beside me, then. There, that is right. This is our betrothal, Milly. Say the words, dear, since you would have them, while I slip on the ring.”
“Let us say them together. Oh, Norton, it is to be forever!”
“Forever. Give me your dear hand. Now with me. ‘The Lord’—‘The Lord,’”—her clear voice mingled with his deep one. “The Lord watch—between thee—and me—when we are parted—(but we never shall be!) when we are parted—the one from the other.” The ring shone on her finger, their lips met in a long kiss. He caught her to him and laid her head upon his breast and her arms around his neck, and they stood thus, silently, while the seconds passed. What power was in those words of might to bring a sudden hush upon both hearts, and to change the sunshine into the awesome, beautiful light of another world? Something deeper, nobler, purer than they stirred those two souls, and made them sacredly, divinely one. Each felt intensely what neither could have expressed. Never, while life lasted, could the witness of that moment be forgotten.
Long after her lover had left her Milly sat in the garden, her face half hidden in the roses, with the bees still booming around the syringas, and the sky growing bluer and bluer in the heat of noon. She heard the choir boys singing now in the little churchyard near by as they marched around the open grave,
“Brief life is here our portion,
Brief sorrow, shortlived care,
The life that knows no ending,