Mrs. Stratton had expressed herself as eager that Rose should be married from her house, and Rose was willing. I was glad that she was, for many reasons: I did not, for instance, want the wedding in our church, or the reception in our house, with Eustace’s people all about; I did not want to see Rose’s husband driving away with her into a new life, alien to me, from my door, her door. I could not bear the idea of continuing to entertain the crowd after their departure, when any decent man would wish to be alone. These were selfish enough reasons, but also natural. I deny that they lay me open to any very severe censure. At the same time I should have liked it had Rose said that only from her true home would she be married. But she did not. Not improbably she had that desire, but was anxious to spare my feelings. She knew that Eustace could never be congenial to me, and least of all as her captor. * * * * * I went to the wedding, of course; and I have never been more miserable. It was enough that my Rose was standing there at the chancel steps; but there was more. This was my first wedding for many years, and I was startled by the service. The gravity and solemnity of the promises exacted from each—such promises as not even angels are asked to make and keep, for there is notoriously no marriage or giving in marriage among them—filled me with gloom and foreboding and a sense of injustice. It seemed wrong to ask any human beings—and particularly boys and girls—to commit themselves in this way. I wondered if barristers when being married have thoughts of the Divorce Court in their minds—that overworked department of the profession where the morbid and inquisitive assemble day after day to gloat over the fragments that remain when all these sacred bonds and assurances have been broken. “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” I heard Eustace repeat after the clergyman. But did he? Does any husband? What would be a husband’s attitude if the next morning his wife said that she wanted his property—all the worldly goods with which he had publicly endowed her—at once? The commonest cause of married unhappiness that I know of is the refusal of husbands to give their wives even a requisite fraction of their worldly goods for current household expenses. But the words will go on being repeated at the chancel steps for many a year yet. “In sickness and in health”—doctors know something about the value of that undertaking, too, and how it is honoured.