In the sombre old parish house in Sixteenth Street an austere and quiet man listened with sympathy to Augusta, and studied Wardwell. He knew Rose Wilding. He knew that there was no other way in which she could be brought home to the love and care which she would need. But the responsibility of asking a dispensation for the immediate marriage of these two children, as they seemed to him, was one that he did not care to undertake.
In the end, in answer to Augusta's pleading, he said slowly:
"I do not know. I feel that I am not wise enough to advise. But I will send you to the Chancellor himself. He can give you an instant answer, which I could not."
"Serves me right," said Wardwell, when they were in the street again. "If I could have told him that I had a regular job, he'd have listened to me. The best I could say was that I was trying to write. And he was too polite to tell me that all the people in the United States that have ever been in high school, and plenty that haven't, are trying that—or have tried it."
"You can write, Jimmie," said Augusta sincerely. And then she smiled. "But you look so cherubically young!"
"I'm twenty-four!" he exploded.
"And look nineteen, and, sometimes—"
"Act fourteen, eh? That's right, let's fight. That'll soon bring the wrinkles to my alabaster brow. And then you'll be satisfied."
"We wont fight ever, Jimmie," said Augusta gently as she took his arm and fell into step with him.
The Chancellor received them promptly when he had read the note of introduction and explanation which they had brought from the priest. He was an extremely busy man whose work it was, day after day, year after year, to give quick decisions which he knew must affect the lives and happiness of individual men and women. But in most of these decisions he had no discretion. He had but to have the facts, and state the inflexible law that governed him.