It was only when the words, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” were repeated that he smiled and looked down at the woman beside him. She caught his eye and laughed a little, as she turned hurriedly away, though he could see the tear-drops glistening on her eyelashes. She held his hand fiercely in her own, as they rode from the little ivy-covered church, each wondering at the mood of ineloquence weighing down the other. “Do you know,” she said, musingly, “I feel as though I had been bought and sold, that I had been tied up and given to you, that—oh, that I had been nailed on to you with horseshoe nails! Do you feel any difference?” “I feel as though I had been cheated out of something—it’s so hard to express!—that I ought to have found another You when I turned away from the railing; that I ought to be carrying off a different You altogether—and yet—yet here you are, the same old adorable You, with not a particle of change!” “After all, what is it? Why, Jim dear, we were married, in reality, that afternoon I opened the door to MacNutt’s ring and saw you standing there looking in at me as though you had seen a ghost!” “No, my own, we were joined together and made one a million years ago, you and I, in some unknown star a million million miles away from this old earth; and through all those years we have only wandered and drifted about, looking for each other!” “Silly!” she said happily, with her slow, English smile. In the gloom of the taxi-cab, with a sudden impulsive little movement of the body, she leaned over and kissed him. “You forgot that,” she said joyously, from the pillow of his shoulder. “You forgot about that in the chapel!” They drifted down through what seemed a shadowy and far-away city, threading their course past phantasmal carriages and spectral crowds engrossed in their foolish little ghost-like businesses of buying and selling, of coming and going. “You’re all I’ve got now,” she murmured again, with irrelevant dolefulness. Her head still rested on the hollow of his shoulder. His only answer was to draw the warmth and clinging weight of her body closer to him. “And you’ll have to die some day!” she wailed in sudden misery. And though he laughingly protested that she was screwing him down a little too early in the game, she reached up with her ineffectual arms and flung them passionately about him, much as she had done before, as though such momentary guardianship might shield him from both life and death itself, for all time to come. CHAPTER XXX Frances sent Durkin on alone to the Chelsea, where, he had finally agreed, they were to take rooms for a week at least. There, she argued, they could live frugally, and there they could escape from the old atmosphere, from the old memories and associations that hour by hour had seemed to grow more unlovely in her eyes.