"Nobody else here yet?" asked my father.
"Traa dy liooar" (time enough), the High Bailiff muttered.
He was an elderly man of intemperate habits who spent his nights at the "Crown and Mitre," and was apparently out of humour at having been brought out of bed so early.
His office was a room of his private house. It had a high desk, a stool and a revolving chair. Placards were pinned on the walls, one over another, and a Testament, with the binding much worn, lay on a table. The place looked half like a doctor's consulting room, and half like a small police court.
Presently Mr. Curphy, my father's advocate, came in, rather irritatingly cheerful in that chill atmosphere, and, half an hour late, my intended husband arrived, with his London lawyer and his friend Eastcliff.
My mind was far from clear and I had a sense of seeing things by flashes only, but I remember that I thought Lord Raa was very nervous, and it even occurred to me that early as it was he had been drinking.
"Beastly nuisance, isn't it?" he said to me aside, and then there was something about "this legal fuss and fuddlement."
With the air of a man with a grievance the High Bailiff took a big book out of the desk, and a smaller one off a shelf, and then we sat in a half circle, and the ceremony began.
It was very brief and cold like a matter of business. As far as I can remember it consisted of two declarations which Lord Raa and I made first to the witnesses present and afterwards to each other. One of them stated that we knew of no lawful impediment why we should not be joined together in matrimony, and the other declared that we were there and then so joined.
I remember that I repeated the words automatically, as the High Bailiff in his thick alcoholic voice read them out of the smaller of his books, and that Lord Raa, in tones of obvious impatience, did the same.