ltering voice:

"I will."

And again, when my husband had to put the ring and the gold and silver
on the salver (he fumbled and dropped them as he did so, and fumbled and
dropped them a second time when he had to take them up after they had
been blessed, laughing too audibly at his own awkwardness), and then
repeat after the Bishop:

"With this ring I thee wed; this gold and silver I thee give; with my
body I thee worship; and with all my worldly goods I thee endow," he
tendered the ring slowly and with an obvious effort.

But I took it without trembling, because I was thinking that, in spite
of all I had heard of his ways of life, this solemn and sacred sacrament
made him mine and no one else's.

It is all very mysterious; I cannot account for it; I only know it was
so, and that, everything considered, it was perhaps the strangest fact
of all my life.

I remember that more than once during the ceremony Father Dan spoke to
me softly and caressingly, as if to a child, but I felt no need of his
comforting, for my strength was from a higher source.

I also remember that it was afterwards said that all through the
ceremony the eyes of the newly-wedded couple seemed sedulously to shun
each other, but if I did not look at my husband it was because my
marriage was like a prayer to me, carrying me back, with its sense of
purity and sanctity, to the little sunlit church in Rome where Mildred
Bankes had taken her vows.

After the marriage service there was Nuptial Mass and Benediction
(special dispensation from Rome), and that raised to a still higher
pitch the spiritual exaltation which sustained me.

Father Dan read the Epistle beginning "Let wives be subject to their
husbands," and then the Bishop read the Gospel, concluding, "Therefore
now they are not two, but one flesh: what therefore God hath joined
together, let not man put asunder."

I had trembled when I thought of these solemn and sonorous words in the
solitude of my own room, but now that they were spoken before the
congregation I had no fear, no misgiving, nothing but a sense of rapture
and consecration.

The last words being spoken and Lord Raa and I being man and wife, we
stepped into the sacristy to sign the register, and not even there did
my spirit fail me. I took up the pen and signed my name without a
tremor. But hardly had I done so when I heard a rumbling murmur of
voices about me--first the Bishop's voice (in such a worldly tone) and
then my