"Three wives!" gasped Godfrey.
"Yes, why not? It would be quite natural, wouldn't it, if you wouldn't marry me, and even proper. Only I should never take one--husband, I mean--not from any particular virtue, but just because I couldn't. You see, it would make me ill. And if I tried I should only run away."
"Oh! stop talking nonsense," said Godfrey, "when so soon you will have to go to see about those people," and he held out his arms.
She sank into them, and for a little while they forgot their doubts and fears.
The rain had ceased, and the triumphant sun shining gloriously through the west window of stained glass, poured its rays upon them, dyeing them all the colours of an angel's wings. Also incidentally it made them extremely conspicuous in that dusky church, of which they had all this while forgotten to shut the door.
"My word!" said Sir John to Mr. Knight in tones of savage sarcasm as they surveyed the two through this door. "We've got here just at the right time. Don't they look pretty, and don't you wish that you were his age and that was someone else's daughter? I tell you, I do."
Mr. Knight gurgled something in his inarticulate wrath, for at that moment he hated Isobel's father as much as he did Isobel, which was saying a great deal.
"Well, my pretty pair of cooing turtle-doves," went on Sir John in a sort of shout, addressing himself to them, "be so good as to stop that, or I think I shall wring both your necks, damn you."
"Not in this Holy House, which these infamous and shameless persons have desecrated with their profane embraces," interrupted Mr. Knight.
"Yes, according to your ideas it will be almost a case of re-consecration. You'll have to write to the bishop about it, Mr. Parson. Oh! confound you. Don't stand there like a couple of stuck pigs, but come out of that and let us have a little chat in the churchyard."
Now, at the first words that reached their ears Godfrey and Isobel had drawn back from each other and stood side by side quite still before the altar, as a pair about to be married might do.
They were dumbfounded, and no wonder. As might be expected Isobel was the first to recover herself.
"Come, my dear," she said in a clear voice to Godfrey, "my father and yours wish to speak to us. I am glad we have a chance of explaining matters so soon."
"Yes," said Godfrey, but in a wrathful voice, for he felt anger stirring in him. Perhaps it was excited by that ancient instinct which causes the male animal to resent the spying upon him when he is courting his female as the deadliest of all possible insults, or perhaps by some prescience of affronts which were about to be offered to him and Isobel by these two whom he knew to be bitterly hostile. At least his temper was rising, and like most rather gentle-natured men when really provoked and cornered, he could be dangerous.