“I can’t bear to think of other people watching us at such a time,” she had said. “I want to feel alone.”
He had nodded assent, grateful for the depth of delicacy which he divined in her. Now, in the carriage, O’Leary left behind on the curb with still uplifted hat, he had a feeling of being indeed alone, alone with strange thoughts which surprised him, alone with the sudden stranger who sat silently by his side, whose thoughts he could not divine, alone and yet violently and abruptly apart. She had passed through the ceremony as one steeled to an ordeal, gravely calm, without useless words, neither showing joy, nor elation, nor trace of shyness or excitement. When he had put the ring on her finger and the words had been pronounced which made them man and wife, she turned and looked at him—a long, searching glance that moved him so that he forgot his surroundings gazing into the profound eyes that seemed to open to him the road to tears. The judge joked him for a laggard; he caught himself, glanced down at her, and kissed her hurriedly.
“Best man’s privilege!” said the judge, chuckling, while the attendants grinned.
She gravely offered her cheek to O’Leary, who hesitated and then raised her hand to his lips.
When they were at last alone, Dangerfield said abruptly:
“You can take it off now; you don’t need to wear it—the ring.”
She took off her glove and held up the little hand with the golden circle shining among the slender fingers. Then she drew the glove on again.
“No; I shall wear it.”
He felt a strangeness in this intimacy, almost a diffidence. He wondered why he could not speak to her, but he remained silent—he could not mention trivial things, and what lay next to their hearts seemed forbidden. For the thoughts that had come to him now seemed to be the beginning of the barrier which would grow between them day by day, month by month, the prohibition that every one instinctively erects to solitudes of the soul from the encroachment of complete possession.
He had taken the final step, and he felt its finality; he had burned his bridges behind him—there was now no retreat back into the life from which he had come, into that kingdom of caste that, despite the devastation it had worked on him, still held him with remembered instinct.