As Minna had taken care to have completed the fifteen days’ residence required of one of the parties for a marriage by license, it was she who, accompanied by Hugh, gave the necessary notice the next day. On the Tuesday in Whitsun week they were married, taking with them, as one witness, Anna Cassaba, whose Jewish conscience Minna had wheedled into complicity. The old woman, bent and thin, her swarthy face wrinkled with a myriad lines, fastened eyes upon them that still glowed with unquenched fires. Her darling’s prince had come. A handsome prince, indeed, for which she pardoned him his Gentile birth. But it took all her love for Minna to reconcile her to the non-religious ceremony. Its bareness shocked her. The Registrar was an old man in a skull cap, with long, white beard and lack-lustre eyes. He took but indifferent interest in the pair. A wearied resignation showed itself in his manner, as he administered the customary declarations, and pointed with shrivelled finger to the spaces wherein they should sign their names. He reminded one of an old scholar serving out trumpery fiction to the subscribers of a circulating library. A sorry book he was delivering up to them. A trivial pair were they for desiring it. He wished them good luck in a mechanical, far off tone. If they had put the fees in the slot of an automatic machine and drawn out a marriage certificate, the business could not have been more impersonally concluded. Out in the street again they parted from the old woman, who stood for some time watching them as they went in the direction of the new lodgings that Hugh had engaged on the Parade. She would dearly have loved to shelter them like love-birds in her own nest. But prudence forbade Minna to reveal her secret to Anna’s servants. She sighed as soon as they had disappeared, and turning her slow steps homewards, thought in her old woman’s way of the beautiful children that would be.