was a piece of romantic folly, he had acquired more zest
for the grand experiment. He wished the ceremony to be in London, for
greater privacy. Edith Harnham would have preferred it at Melchester;
Anna was passive. His reasoning prevailed, and Mrs. Harnham threw
herself with mournful zeal into the preparations for Anna's departure. In
a last desperate feeling that she must at every hazard be in at the death
of her dream, and see once again the man who by a species of telepathy
had exercised such an influence on her, she offered to go up with Anna
and be with her through the ceremony--'to see the end of her,' as her
mistress put it with forced gaiety; an offer which the girl gratefully
accepted; for she had no other friend capable of playing the part of
companion and witness, in the presence of a gentlemanly bridegroom, in
such a way as not to hasten an opinion that he had made an irremediable
social blunder.

It was a muddy morning in March when Raye alighted from a four-wheel cab
at the door of a registry-office in the S.W. district of London, and
carefully handed down Anna and her companion Mrs. Harnham. Anna looked
attractive in the somewhat fashionable clothes which Mrs. Harnham had
helped her to buy, though not quite so attractive as, an innocent child,
she had appeared in her country gown on the back of the wooden horse at
Melchester Fair.

Mrs. Harnham had come up this morning by an early train, and a young
man--a friend of Raye's--having met them at the door, all four entered
the registry-office together. Till an hour before this time Raye had
never known the wine-merchant's wife, except at that first casual
encounter, and in the flutter of the performance before them he had
little opportunity for more than a brief acquaintance. The contract of
marriage at a registry is soon got through; but somehow, during its
progress, Raye discovered a strange and secret gravitation between
himself and Anna's friend.

The formalities of the wedding--or rather ratification of a previous
union--being concluded, the four went in one cab to Raye's lodgings,
newly taken in a new suburb in preference to a house, the rent of which
he could ill afford just then. Here Anna cut the little cake which Raye
had bought at a pastrycook's on his way home from Lincoln's Inn the night
before. But she did not do much besides. Raye's friend was obliged to
depart almost immediately, and when he had left the only ones virtually
prese