“Let’s get through with this,” growled the half-drunken, ruffian priest.  “I take the willingness of the parties for granted.”

“I am not willing,” cried Elsa.  “I have been brought here by force.  I call everyone present to witness that whatever is done is against my will.  I appeal to God to help me.”

The priest turned upon Ramiro.

“How am I to marry them in the face of this?” he asked.  “If only she were silent it might be done——­”

“The difficulty has occurred to me,” answered Ramiro.  He made a sign, whereon Simon seized Elsa’s wrists, and Black Meg, slipping behind her, deftly fastened a handkerchief over her mouth in such fashion that she was gagged, but could still breathe through the nostrils.

Elsa struggled a little, then was quiet, and turned her piteous eyes on Adrian, who stepped forward and opened his lips.

“You remember the alternative,” said his father in a low voice, and he stopped.

“I suppose,” broke in Father Thomas, “that we may at any rate reckon upon the consent, or at least upon the silence of the Heer bridegroom.”

“You may reckon on his silence, Father Thomas,” replied Ramiro.

Then the ceremony began.  They dragged Elsa to the table.  Thrice she flung herself to the ground, and thrice they lifted her to her feet, but at length, weary of the weight of her body, suffered her to rest upon her knees, where she remained as though in prayer, gagged like some victim on the scaffold.  It was a strange and brutal scene, and every detail of it burned itself into Adrian’s mind.  The round, rude room, with its glowing fire of turfs and its rough, oaken furniture, half in light and half in dense shadow, as the lamp-rays chanced to fall; the death-like, kneeling bride, with a white cloth across her tortured face; the red-chopped, hanging-lipped hedge priest gabbling from a book, his back almost turned that he might not see her attitude and struggles; the horrible, unsexed women; the flat-faced villain, Simon, grinning by the hearth; Ramiro, cynical, mocking, triumphant, and yet somewhat anxious, his one bright eye fixed in mingled contempt and amusement upon him, Adrian—­those were its outlines.  There was something else also that caught and oppressed his sense, a sound which at the time Adrian thought he heard in his head alone, a soft, heavy sound with a moan in it, not unlike that of the wind, which grew gradually to a dull roar.

It was over.  A ring had been forced on to Elsa’s unwilling hand, and, until the thing was undone by some competent and authorised Court, she was in name the wife of Adrian.  The handkerchief was unbound, her hands were loosed, physically, Elsa was free again, but, in that day and land of outrage, tied, as the poor girl knew well, by a chain more terrible than any that hemp or steel could fashion.

“Congratulations!  Senora,” muttered Father Thomas, eyeing her nervously.  “I fear you felt a little faint during the service, but a sacrament——­”