her hands and
tried to smooth back the locks that had escaped from her braid. There
was a looking-glass in a carved frame on the wall, but she was ashamed
to look at herself in it, and she sat with her hands folded on her knee
till the clergyman returned. Then they went out again, along a sort of
arcaded passage, and into a low vaulted room with a cross on an altar,
and rows of benches. The clergyman, who had left them at the door,
presently reappeared before the altar in a surplice, and a lady who was
probably his wife, and a man in a blue shirt who had been raking dead
leaves on the lawn, came in and sat on one of the benches.

The clergyman opened a book and signed to Charity and Mr. Royall to
approach. Mr. Royall advanced a few steps, and Charity followed him as
she had followed him to the buggy when they went out of Mrs. Hobart's
kitchen; she had the feeling that if she ceased to keep close to him,
and do what he told her to do, the world would slip away from beneath
her feet.

The clergyman began to read, and on her dazed mind there rose the memory
of Mr. Miles, standing the night before in the desolate house of the
Mountain, and reading out of the same book words that had the same dread
sound of finality:

"I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day
of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if
either of you know any impediment whereby ye may not be lawfully joined
together..."

Charity raised her eyes and met Mr. Royall's. They were still looking
at her kindly and steadily. "I will!" she heard him say a moment later,
after another interval of words that she had failed to catch. She was so
busy trying to understand the gestures that the clergyman was signalling
to her to make that she no longer heard what was being said. After
another interval the lady on the bench stood up, and taking her hand put
it in Mr. Royall's. It lay enclosed in his strong palm and she felt
a ring that was too big for her being slipped on her thin finger. She
understood then that she was married....

Late that afternoon Charity sat alone in a bedroom of the fashionable
hotel where she and Harney had vainly sought a table on the Fourth of
July. She had never before been in so handsomely furnished a room. The
mirror above the dressing-table reflected the high head-board and fluted
pillow-slips of the double bed, and a bedspread so spotlessly white that
she had hesitated to lay her hat