“Very well, then, I will carry out my promise, dreadful as it is to me; but remember that it is only because you beg it, and that the responsibility of its consequences must always remain with you.  Now, are you satisfied?—­you will get your land.”

Philip’s dark face assumed a look of fervent gratitude, but before he had time to reply, a messenger came to say that “the gentleman” was waiting.

Her resolve once taken, Angela followed him with an untroubled face into the room where the registrar, a gentleman neatly dressed in black, was sitting at a sort of desk.  Here the first thing her glance fell upon was the person of George Caresfoot.  Although it was now the second week in June, he wore a respirator over his mouth and a scarf round his neck, and coughed very much.  These were the first things she noticed.  The next was that he was much thinner, so thin that the cheek-bones stood out from the level of his face, whilst the little blood-shot eyes seemed to protrude, giving to his general appearance, even with the mouth (his worst feature) hidden by the respirator, an unusually repulsive look.  He was leaning on the arm of Lady Bellamy, who greeted Angela with a smile which the latter fancied had something of triumph in it.

With the exception of the messenger, who played the part of clerk in this civil ceremony, there was nobody else in the room.  No greetings were interchanged, and in another moment Angela was standing, dressed in her funeral black, by George’s side before the registrar, and the ceremony had begun.

But from that moment, although her beautiful face preserved its composure, she scarcely saw or heard anything of what was going on.  It was as though all the streams of thought in her brain had burst their banks and mingled in a great and turbulent current.  She was filled with thought, but could seize upon no one idea, whilst within her mind she heard a sound as of the continuous whirring of broken machinery.

Objects and individuals, real and imagined, presented themselves before her mental vision, expanded till they filled the heavens with their bulk, and then shrank and shrank, and vanished into nothing.  The word “wife” struck upon her ears, and seemed to go wailing away, “wife, wife, wife,” through all the illimitable halls of sound, till they were filled with echoes, and sound itself fell dead against the silence of the stars.

It was done.  She awoke to find herself a married woman.  Lady Bellamy stepped forward with the same half-triumphant smile with which she had greeted Angela hovering about her lips.

“Let me congratulate you, Mrs. Caresfoot,” she said; “indeed, I think I am privileged to do so, for, if I remember right, I was the first to prophesy this happy event;” and then, dropping her voice so that Angela alone could hear her, “Do you not remember that I told you that you would as certainly come to the altar rails within nine months with George Caresfoot as you would to your death-bed?  I said that nine months ago to-day.”