advantage to both)
came to a pause, and the congregation were to be taken into confidence,
how came Gerry to know beforehand what the fat one was going to say,
with that stupendous voice of his?

"_Hoc est corpus meum, et hic est calix sanguinis mei._ We all kneel,
I think." Thus the bridegroom under his breath. And his companion heard,
almost with a shudder, the selfsame words from the priest, as the
kneeling of the congregation subsided.

"Oh, Gerry--darling fellow! How _can_ you know that, and not know...."

"How I came by it? It's very funny, but I _can't_, and that's the
truth. I don't feel as if I ever _could_ know, what's more. But it all
seems a matter of course."

"Perhaps you're a Catholic all the while, without knowing it?"

"Perhaps I am. But I should like to know, because of going to the other
place with you. I shouldn't care about purgatory without you, Rosey
dearest. No--not even with a reversionary interest in heaven."

And then the plot thickened at the altar, and the odour of myrrh and
frankincense, and little bells rang to a climax, and the handsome young
priest, let us hope, felt he had got value for the loss of that
hypothetical girl.

* * * * *

That little incident in the great church at Rheims was the first
anxiety of Rosalind Fenwick's married life--the first resumption of the
conditions she had been so often unnerved by during the period of their
betrothal. She was destined to be crossed by many such. But she was, as
we have said, a strong woman, and had made up her mind to take these
anxieties as part of the day's work--a charge upon her happiness that
had to be paid. It was a great consolation to her that she could speak
to her husband about the tension caused by her misgivings without
assigning any special reasons for anxiety that would not be his as much
as hers. She had to show uneasiness in order to get the relief his
sympathy gave her; but there were unknown possibilities in the Bush
enough to warrant it without going outside what was known to both. No
need at all that he should know of her separate unseen burden, for that!

But some of the jolts on the road, as we might call them, were to be
sore trials to Rosalind. One came in the fourth week of their honeymoon,
and quite spoiled for her the last three days of her holiday. However,
Fenwick himself laughed about it--that was one comfort.

It was at Sonnenberg. You know the Great Hotel, or Pensio