Lorison knelt quickly by her side and took her hands.
'Dear Norah!' he said, exultantly. 'It is you, it is you I love! You never guessed it, did you? 'Tis you I meant all the time. Now I can speak. Let me make you forget the past. We have both suffered; let us shut out the world, and live for each other. Norah, do you hear me say I love you?'
'In spite of -- '
'Rather say because of it. You have come out of your past noble and good. Your heart is an angel's, Give it to me.'
'A little while ago you feared the future too much to even speak.'
'But for you; not for myself. Can you love me?'
She cast herself, wildly sobbing, upon his breast.
'Better than life -- than truth itself -- than every- thing.'
'And my own past,' said Lorison, with a note of solicitude -- 'can you forgive and -- '
'I answered you that,' she whispered, 'when I told you I loved you.' She leaned away, and looked thought- fully at him. 'If I had not told you about myself, would you have -- would you -- '
'No,' he interrupted; 'I would never have let you know I loved you. I would never have asked you this -- Norah, will you be my wife?'
She wept again.
'Oh, believe me; I am good now -- I am no longer wicked! I will be the best wife in the world. Don't think I am -- bad any more. If you do I shall die, I shall die!'
While he was consoling, her, she brightened up, eager and impetuous. 'Will vou marry me to-night?' she said. 'Will you prove it that way. I have a reason for wishing it to be to-night. Will you?'
Of one of two things was this exceeding frankness the outcome: either of importunate brazenness or of utter innocence. The lover's perspective contained only the one.
'The sooner,' said Lorison, 'the happier I shall be.'
'What is there to do?' she asked. 'What do you have to get? Come! You should know.'
Her energy stirred the dreamer to action.
'A city directory first,' he cried, gayly, 'to find where the man lives who gives licenses to happiness. We will go together and rout him out. Cabs, cars, policemen, telephones and ministers shall aid us.'
'Father Rogan shall marry us,' said the girl, with ardour. 'I will take you to him.'
An hour later the two stood at the open doorway of an immense, gloomy brick building in a narrow and lonely street. The license was tight in Norah's hand.
'Wait here a moment,' she said, 'till I find Father Rogan.'
She plunged into the black hallway, and the lover was left standing, as it were, on one leg, outside. His impa- tience was not greatly taxed. Gazing curiously into what seemed the hallway to Erebus, he was presently reassured by a stream of light that bisected the darkness, far down the passage. Then he heard her call, and fluttered lampward, like the moth. She beckoned him through a doorway into the room whence emanated the light. The room was bare of nearly everything except books, which had subjugated all its space. Here and there little spots of territory had been reconquered. An elderly, bald man, with a superlatively calm, remote eye, stood by a table with a book in his hand, his finger still marking a page. His dress was sombre and appertained to a religious order. His eye denoted an acquaintance with the perspective.
'Father Rogan,' said Norah, 'this is he.'
'The two of ye,' said Father Rogan, 'want to get married?'
They did not deny it. He married them. The cere- mony was quickly done. One who could have witnessed it, and felt its scope, might have trembled at the terrible inadequacy of it to rise to the dignity of its endless chain of results.
Afterward the priest spake briefly, as if by rote, of certain other civil and legal addenda that either might or should, at a later time, cap the ceremony. Lorison tendered a fee, which was declined, and before the door closed after the departing couple Father Rogan's book popped open again where his finger marked it.
In the dark hall Norah whirled and clung to her com- panion, tearful.
'Will you never, never be sorry?'
At last she was reassured.
At the first light they reached upon the street, she asked the time, just as she had each night. Lorison looked at his watch. Half-past eight.
Lorison thought it was from habit that she guided their steps toward the corner where they always parted. But, arrived there, she hesitated, and then released his arm. A drug store stood on the corner; its bright, soft light shone upon them.
'Please leave me here as usual to-night,' said Norah, sweetly. 'I must -- I would rather you would. You will not object? At six to-morrow evening I will meet you at Antonio's. I want to sit with vou there once more. And then -- I will go where you say.' She gave him a bewildering, bright smile, and walked swiftly away.
Surely it needed all the strength of her charm to carry off this astounding behaviour. It was no discredit to Lorison's strength of mind that his head began to whirl. Pocketing his hands, he rambled vacuously over to the druggist's windows, and began assiduously to spell over the names of the patent medicines therein displayed.
As soon as be had recovered his wits, he proceeded along the street in an aimless fashion. After drifting for two or three squares, he flowed into a somewhat more pretentious thoroughfare, a way much frequented by him in his solitary ramblings. For here was a row of slops devoted to traffic in goods of the widest range of choice --
