He feared, during a few seconds of anguish, that he might reveal his heartache to these men of inferior races.

Then the pride of a regal birthright came to his aid, and a species of most vivid and poignant consciousness succeeded. He heard Steinbaum’s gruff sponsorship for the bride, obeyed smilingly when told to take her right hand in his right hand, and looked with singular intentness at the long, straight, artistic fingers which he held.

It was a beautifully modeled hand, well kept, but cold and tremulous. The queer conceit leaped up in him that though he might never look on the face of his wedded wife he would know that hand if they met again only at the Judgment Seat!

Then, in a dazed way which impressed the onlookers as the height of American nonchalance, he said, after the celebrant: “I, Philip Alexander, take thee, Madeleine—”

Madeleine! So that was the Christian name of the woman whom he was taking “till death do us part,” for the Spanish liturgy provided almost an exact equivalent of the English service. [Pg 18]Madeleine! He had never even known any girl of the name. Somehow, he liked it. Outwardly so calm, he was inwardly aflame with a new longing for life and all that life meant.

[Pg 18]

His jumbled wits were peremptorily recalled to the demands of the moment by the would-be bride’s failure to repeat her share of the marriage vow, when it became her turn to take Maseden’s hand.

The priest nodded, and Steinbaum, now carrying himself with a certain truculence, essayed to lead the girl’s faltering tongue through the Spanish phrases.

“The lady must understand what she is saying,” broke in Maseden, dominating the gruff man by sheer force of will.

“Now,” he said, and his voice grew gentle as he turned to the woman he had just promised “to have and to hold,” “to love and cherish,” and thereto plighted his troth—“when the priest pauses, I will translate, and you must speak the words aloud.”

He listened, in a waking trance, to the clear, well-bred accents of a woman of his own people uttering the binding pledge of matrimony. The Spanish sentences recalled the English version, which he supplied with singular accuracy, seeing that he had only attended two weddings previously, and those during his boyhood.

[Pg 19]

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