The maid gaped first at one, then at the other, left them reluctantly to admit Arkwright.  As she opened the door she had to draw back a little.  There was Craig immediately behind her.  He swept her aside, flung the door wide.  “Come on!  Hurry!” he cried to Grant.  “We’re waiting.”  And he seized him by the arm and thrust him into the parlor.  At the same instant the preacher entered by another door.  Craig’s excitement, far from diminishing, grew wilder and wilder.  The preacher thought him insane or drunk.  Grant and Margaret tried in vain to calm him.  Nothing would do but the ceremony instantly—­and he had his way.  Never was there a more undignified wedding.  When the responses were all said and the marriage was a fact accomplished, so far as preacher could accomplish it, Craig seemed suddenly to subside.

“I should like to go into the next room for a moment,” said the pallid and trembling Margaret.

“Certainly,” said Doctor Scones sympathetically, and, with a fierce scowl at the groom, he accompanied the bride from the room.

“What a mess you have made!” exclaimed Arkwright indignantly.  “You’ve been acting like a lunatic.”

“It wasn’t acting—­altogether,” laughed Josh, giving Grant one of those tremendous slaps on the back.  “You see, it was wise to give her something else to think about so she couldn’t possibly hesitate or bolt.  So I just gave way to my natural feelings.  It’s a way I have in difficult situations.”

Grant’s expression as he looked at him was a mingling of admiration, fear and scorn.  “You are full of those petty tricks,” said he.

“Why petty?  Is it petty to meet the requirements of a situation?  The situation was petty—­the trick had to be.  Besides, I tell you, it wasn’t a trick.  If I hadn’t given my nerves an outlet I might have balked or bolted myself.  I didn’t want to have to think any more than she.”

“You mustn’t say those things to me,” objected his friend.

“Why not?  What do I care what you or any one else thinks of me?  And what could you do except simply think?  Old pal, you ought to learn not to judge me by the rules of your little puddle.  It’s a ridiculous habit.”  He leaped at the door where Margaret had disappeared and rapped on it fiercely.

“Yes—­yes—­I’m coming,” responded a nervous, pleading, agitated voice; and the door opened and Margaret appeared.

“What shall we do now?” she said to Craig.  Grant saw, with an amazement he could scarcely conceal, that for the time, at least, she was quite subdued, would meekly submit to anything.

“Go to your grandmother,” said Craig promptly.  “You attend to the preacher, Grant.  Twenty-five’s enough to give him.”

Margaret’s cheeks flamed, her head bowed.  Grant flushed in sympathy with her agony before this vulgarity.  And a moment later he saw Margaret standing, drooping and resigned, at the curb, while Craig excitedly hailed a cab.  “Poor girl!” he muttered, “living with that nightmare-in-breeches will surely kill her—­so delicate, so refined, so sensitive!”