It could not be said the Church Leet chimes brought good when they rang out that night at midnight, as the old year was giving place to the new.  Mrs. Carradyne, in her superstition, thought they brought evil.  Certainly evil set in at the same time, and Captain Monk, with all his scoffing obstinacy, could not fail to see it.  That fine young lad, his son, fell through the window listening to them; and in the self-same hour the knowledge reached him that Katherine, his eldest and dearest child, had flown from his roof in defiant disobedience, to set up a home of her own.

Hubert was soon well of his bruises; but not of the cold induced by lying in the snow, clad only in his white nightshirt.  In spite of all Mr. Speck’s efforts, rheumatic fever set in, and for some time Hubert hovered between life and death.  He recovered; but would never again be the strong, hearty lad he had been—­though indeed he had never been very physically strong.  The doctor privately hoped that the heart would be found all right in future, but he would not have answered for it.

The blow that told most on Captain Monk was that inflicted by Katherine.  And surely never was disobedient marriage carried out with the impudent boldness of hers.  Church Leet called it “cheek.”  Church Leet (disbelieving the facts when they first oozed out) could talk of nothing else for weeks.  For Katherine had been married in the church hard by, that same night.

Special licenses were very uncommon things in those days; they cost too much; but the Reverend Thomas Dancox had procured one.  With Katherine’s money:  everybody guessed that.  She had four hundred a-year of her own, inherited from her dead mother, and full control over it.  So the special license was secured, and their crafty plans were laid.  The stranger who had presented himself at the Hall that night (by arrangement), asking for Mr. Dancox, thus affording an excuse for his quitting the banquet-room, was a young clergyman of Worcester, come over especially to marry them.  When tackled with his deed afterwards, he protested that he had not been told the marriage was to be clandestine.  Tom Dancox went out to him from the banquet; Katherine, slipping on a bonnet and shawl, joined them outside; they hastened to the rectory and thence into the church.  And while the unconscious master of Leet Hall was entertaining his guests with his good cheer and his stories and his hip, hip, hurrah, his Vicar and Katherine Monk were made one until death should them part.  And death, as it proved, intended to do that speedily.

At first Captain Monk, in his unbounded rage, was for saying that a marriage celebrated at ten o’clock at night by the light of a solitary tallow candle, borrowed from the vestry, could not hold good.  Re-assured upon this point, he strove to devise other means to part them.  Foiled again, he laid the case before the Bishop of Worcester, and begged his lordship to unfrock Thomas Dancox.  The Bishop did not do as much as that; though he sent for Tom Dancox and severely reprimanded him.  But that, as Church Leet remarked, did not break bones.  Tom had striven to make the best of his own cause to the Bishop, and the worst of Captain Monk’s obdurate will; moreover, stolen marriages were not thought much of in those days.