uld feel ashamed. He wondered if he ought
to kiss her. At last he did, on the top of her head, very gently. Then
she put up her face and said she was a beast. And he kissed her again on
an eyebrow.

After that she seemed all right, and very gingerly they descended to the
ground, where shadows were beginning to lengthen over the fern and the
sun to slant into their eyes.

XIII

The night after the wedding the boy stood at the window of his pleasant
attic bedroom, with one wall sloping, and a faint smell of mice. He was
tired and excited, and his brain, full of pictures. This was his first
wedding, and he was haunted by a vision of his sister's little white
form, and her face with its starry eyes. She was gone--his no more! How
fearful the Wedding March had sounded on that organ--that awful old
wheezer; and the sermon! One didn't want to hear that sort of thing when
one felt inclined to cry. Even Gordy had looked rather boiled when he was
giving her away. With perfect distinctness he could still see the group
before the altar rails, just as if he had not been a part of it himself.
Cis in her white, Sylvia in fluffy grey; his impassive brother-in-law's
tall figure; Gordy looking queer in a black coat, with a very yellow
face, and eyes still half-closed. The rotten part of it all had been
that you wanted to be just FEELING, and you had to be thinking of the
ring, and your gloves, and whether the lowest button of your white
waistcoat was properly undone. Girls could do both, it seemed--Cis
seemed to be seeing something wonderful all the time, and Sylvia had
looked quite holy. He himself had been too conscious of the rector's
voice, and the sort of professional manner with which he did it all, as
if he were making up a prescription, with directions how to take it. And
yet it was all rather beautiful in a kind of fashion, every face turned
one way, and a tremendous hush--except for poor old Godden's blowing of
his nose with his enormous red handkerchief; and the soft darkness up in
the roof, and down in the pews; and the sunlight brightening the South
windows. All the same, it would have been much jollier just taking hands
by themselves somewhere, and saying out before God what they really
felt--because, after all, God was everything, everywhere, not only in
stuffy churches. That was how HE would like to be married, out of doors
on a starry night like this, when everything felt wonderful all round
you. Sure