he once knew had left him one day after lunch to consult
his solicitors in Gray's Inn. He entered the low, gloomy gateway and
accosted the porter.

"Are there any solicitors living in the Inn?"

"Not so many as there was. They're mostly architects. But still there's
heaps."

"Will you kindly direct me to one?"

The man gave him two or three addresses, and he went comforted across the
square to the east wing, whose Georgian mass merged without skyline into
the fuliginous vapor which Londoners call the sky. The lights behind the
blindless windows illuminated interiors and showed men bending over desks
and drawing-boards, some near the windows with their faces sharply cut in
profile. Septimus wondered vaguely whether any one of those visible would
be his solicitor.

A member of the first firm he sought happened to be disengaged, a
benevolent young man wearing gold spectacles, who received his request for
guidance with sympathetic interest and unfolded to him the divers methods
whereby British subjects could get married all over the world, including
the High Seas on board one of His Majesty's ships of the Mercantile Marine.
Solicitors are generally bursting with irrelevant information. When,
however, he elicited the fact that one of the parties had a flat in London
which would technically prove the fifteen days' residence, he opened his
eyes.

"But, my dear sir, unless you are bent on a religious ceremony, why not get
married at once before the registrar of the Chelsea district? There are two
ways of getting married before the registrar--one by certificate and one by
license. By license you can get married after the expiration of one whole
day next after the day of the entry of the notice of marriage. That is to
say, if you give notice to-morrow you can get married not the next day, but
the day after. In this way you save the heavy special license fee. How does
it strike you?"

It struck Septimus as a remarkable suggestion, and he admired the lawyer
exceedingly.

"I suppose it's really a good and proper marriage?" he asked.

The benevolent young man reassured him; it would take all the majesty of
the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty division of the High Court of Justice to
dissolve it. Septimus agreed that in these circumstances it must be a
capital marriage. Then the solicitor offered to see the whole matter
through and get him married in the course of a day or two. After which he
dismissed him with a professional