Still she looked at Joshua. He did not move or reply.
"You understand?" I tell you, I who stood under it, that it was queer enough to hear that voice, clear, strong, and yet somehow shattered, passing over our heads. "You understand, Joshua? Andrew's come back to the wedding, and now I'll marry you—if you wish."
Even yet Joshua did not speak, nor did the dry anger of his face change. He came walking, taking his time, first along the pews at the front, then up the length of the aisle. Coming down a few steps, Mary waited for him, and there was a kind of a smile now on her lips.
Joshua halted before her. Folding his hands behind him he looked her over slowly from head to foot.
"You lie!" That was all he said.
"Oh, no, Joshua. I'm not lying. Andrew has come for the wedding."
"You lie," he repeated in the same impassive tone. "You know I know you lie, Mary, for you know I know that Andrew is dead."
"Yes, yes—" She was fumbling to clear a damp fold of her gown from something held in the crook of her arm. "But I didn't say——"
With that she had the burden uncovered and held forth in her outstretched hand.
She held it out in the light where all of us could see—the thing Rolldown had discarded from his treasures, that I had picked up and been robbed of in the kindly dark—the old brown casket-thing with the polished surfaces and the bits of intricate and ghastly carvings that had once let in the light of day and the sound of words—the old, brown, sea-bitten, sand-scoured skull of Andrew Blake, with the two gold teeth in the upper jaw dulled by the tarnishing tides that had brought it up slowly from its bed in the bottom of the sea. And to think that I had carried it, and felt of it, and not known what it was!