“You shall never regret it.”
She hung close upon his arm. “No, you won’t let me regret it, will you? You won’t ever let me regret it?”
“ ’Course not.”
“I want to know, when you make that leap to the mountain top, that my arm will be through yours as it is now.”
“It will be then. I shall want to show my treasures to the world,” he said.
Her mouth broke into a smile.
“Nothing else matters,” she said.
II
A registrar is not, as a rule, an enlivening person. He is a dealer in extremities—to him a birth or a death is merely a matter of so many words written upon a page, and a marriage is no greater affair than a union of two people brought together for the purpose of providing him with subjects for his more serious offices.
The particular registrar who was responsible for making Wynne and Eve man and wife was no exception to the rule. He proved to be a man of boundless melancholy, who recited the necessary passages with a gloom of intonation better befitting a burial than a bridal. His distress was acute in that they had failed to import the required witnesses—and, indeed, at one time he seemed disposed to deny them the privileges of his powers. The apartment in which the ceremony took place smelt disagreeably from lack of ventilation, and the newly-wed pair were thankful to come into the sunshine of the street outside.