“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 father’s and then my husband’s, and then the voices of many others, in light conversation mingled with trills of laughter.  And then, in a moment, in a twinkling, as fast as a snowflake melts upon a stream, the spell of the marriage service seemed to break.

I have heard since that my eyes were wet at that moment and I seemed to have been crying all through the ceremony.  I know nothing about that, but I do know that I felt a kind of internal shudder and that it was just as if my soul had suddenly awakened from an intoxicating drug.

The organ began to play the Wedding March, and my husband, putting my arm through his, said, “Come.”

There was much audible whispering among the people waiting for us in the church, and as we walked towards the door I saw ghostly faces smiling at me on every side, and heard ghostly voices speaking in whispers that were like the backward plash of wavelets on the shore.