Howard talked over his plans with Mrs. Graves; there seemed no sort of reason to defer his wedding.  He told her, too, that he had a further plan.  There was a system at Beaufort by which, after a certain number of years’ service, a Fellow could take a year off duty, without affecting his seniority or his position.  “I am going to do this,” he said.  “I do not think it is unwise.  I am too old, I think, both to make Maud’s acquaintance as I wish, and to keep my work going at the same time.  It would be impossible.  So I will settle down here, if you will let me, and try to understand the place and the people; and then if it seems well, I will go back to Cambridge in October year, and go on with my work.  I hope you will approve of that?”

“I do entirely approve,” said Mrs. Graves.  “I will make over to you at once what you will in any case ultimately inherit—­and I believe your young lady is not penniless either?  Well, money has its uses sometimes.”

Howard did this.  Mr. Redmayne wrote him a letter in which affection and cynicism were curiously mingled.

“There will be two to please now instead of one,” he wrote.  “I do not, of course, approve of Dons marrying.  The tender passion is, I believe, inimical to solid work; this I judge from observation rather than from experience.  But you will get over all that when you are settled; and then if you decide to return—­and we can ill spare you—­I hope you will return to work in a reasonable frame of mind.  Pray give my respects to the young lady, and say that if she would like a testimonial to your honesty and sobriety, I shall be happy to send her one.”

All these experiences, shared by Maud, were absurdly delightful to Howard.  She was rather alarmed by Redmayne’s letter.

“I feel as if I were doing rather an awful thing,” she said, “in taking you away like this.  I feel like Hotspur’s wife and Enid rolled into one.  I shouldn’t dare to go with you at once to Cambridge—­I should feel like a Pomeranian dog on a lead.”

And so it came to pass that on a certain Monday in the month of September a very quiet little wedding took place at Windlow.  The bells were rung, and a hideous object of brushwood and bunting, that looked like the work of a bower-bird, was erected in the road, and called a triumphal arch.  Mr. Redmayne insisted on coming, and escorted Monica from Cambridge, “without in any way compromising my honour and virtue,” he said:  “it must be plainly understood that I have no intentions.”  He made a charming speech at the subsequent luncheon, in which he said that, though he personally regretted the turn that affairs had taken, he could not honestly say that, if matrimony were to be regarded as advisable, his friends could have done better.

The strange thing to Howard was the contrast between his own acute and intolerable nervousness, and the entire and radiant self-possession of Maud.  He had a bad hour on the morning of the wedding-day itself.  He had a sort of hideous fear that he had done selfishly and perversely, and that it was impossible that Maud could really continue to love him; that he had sacrificed her youth to his fancy, and his vivid imagination saw himself being wheeled in a bath-chair along the Parade of a health-resort, with Maud in melancholy attendance.