So all day and every day for ten days Michael presumably spent his time with Kathleen, notwithstanding Mrs. Fane’s tenderly malicious teazing, notwithstanding the elder Miss McDonnell’s growing chill, and notwithstanding several very pointed questions from the interfering old spinsters and knitters in the sun of the hotel-gardens. That actually he spent his time alone in watching slow-handed clocks creep on towards a quarter to one or a quarter to five or a quarter to seven, filled Michael daily more full with the spiritual rewards of his sacrifice. He had never known before the luxury of grief, and he had no idea what a variety of becoming attitudes could be wrought of sadness, and not merely attitudes, but veritable dramas. One of the most heroically poignant of these was founded on the moment when Kathleen should ask him to be godfather to her first-born. “No, no,” Michael would exclaim. “Don’t ask me to do that. I have suffered enough.” And Kathleen would remorsefully and silently steal from the dusky room a-flicker with sad firelight, leaving Michael a prey to his own noble thoughts. There was another drama scarcely less moving, in which the first-born died, and Michael, on hearing the news, took the night express to Burton in order to speak words of hope above the little duplicate of Trimble now for ever still in his cradle. Sometimes in the more expansive moments of Michael’s celibacy Trimble and Kathleen would lose all their money, and Michael, again taking the night express to Burton-on-Trent, would offer to adopt about half a dozen duplicates of Trimble. Finally the morning of the marriage arrived, and Michael, feeling that this was an excellent opportunity to have the first of his dramas staged in reality, declined to be present. His refusal was a little less dramatic than he had intended, because Kathleen was too much excited by her own reckless behaviour to act up. While Michael waited for the ceremony’s conclusion, he began a poem called ‘Renunciation.’ Unfortunately the marriage service was very much faster than his Muse, and he never got farther than half the opening line, ‘_If I renounce_.’ Michael, however, ascribed his failure to a little girl who would persist in bouncing a tennis ball near his seat in the gardens. The wedding was only concluded just in time, because Mr. and Mrs. McDonnell arrived on the following day and Michael’s expeditions with Kathleen were immediately forbidden. Possibly the equable Miss McDonnell had been faintly alarmed for her sister’s good name. At any rate she had certainly been annoyed by her continuous neglect.