Under his look, Anne colored. She tried to say something flippant but
could not.
"All right," she whispered finally.
They crossed the street and went up the steps into the rather dirty
corridor, along which fat, red-faced politicians and young clerks
hurried. In the license office, a bored clerk, just about to leave for
his delayed lunch, rushed them through the questions. Anne held up her
right hand and swore. Then Roger. The clerk scribbled in the answers.
Roger paid the fee. They turned away, as legally two as when they had
entered.
But to Anne, something had happened, so that never again would she be
the Anne Mitchell who had come up the steps only a few moments before.
All the weeks of her hidden secret had not made her feel so irrevocably
Roger's as this: a few stereotyped questions gabbled by a bored clerk,
the unimportant fact of her age sworn to with ridiculous solemnity. The
personal quality of her secret had been hers, even through the ordeal
with her parents, but now, it was not hers any longer. It had been
given to the world. This bored, gum-chewing clerk had placarded her
name and Roger's for the world to see. She and Roger were now tagged
and listed, in orthodox fashion, for the great event of matrimony. She
began to tremble.
"Let's--do the--rest--now."
"Anne!" A lump rushed to Roger's throat and he could say no more. Then,
hand in hand, like two children, they crossed the corridor to the
judge's chambers.
In ten minutes it was over, witnessed by a stenographer and the
janitor called in from the hall. The judge made his mechanical speech
of congratulation, which neither heard nor waited for him to finish.
Silent, they walked down the stairs and out into the sunny, dust-filled
wind.
"What--what would you like to do?" Roger felt as if he had suddenly
been left alone in a strange situation with a strange woman.
Anne wanted to cry. "Are--are--you sorry?" she demanded almost angrily.
"Why, sweetheart!" But the thing he had just done was touching Roger to
a seriousness beyond his power to treat gayly.
"Only, we can't go away very well till to-morrow and----"
Anne tried to catch the words fluttering about her like bits of paper
in the wind, but the realization that she was now married, that all
the rest of her life she would come and go, eat and sleep, share the
thoughts of the man beside her, paralyzed her power to think or move.
She could not even look at Roger.
"I'm--going--back to work," she managed at last.
"You are not. Not for a single minute."
The tone left no alternative. Anne thrilled.
"But I can't leave them like this--without notice."
"You're going to do just that. I'll phone Wilmot. It'll be all right."
Anne looked at him with a shy smile. Roger pressed her arm.
"You're mine now, Princess," he whispered. "And to-morrow we'll go away
into the mountains."
Anne nodded, and then there was nothing small and unimportant to say.
They stood in a self-conscious silence that had the separating quality
of space, until Anne broke it:
"I--think--I'll go home now."
"Just as you like, sweetheart." The relief in Roger's tone
disappointed, although Anne did not know what she had expected. An
unending stream of cars all going in the wrong direction passed. They
were both glad of the clanging noise and the wind which made speech
difficult and filled the silence between them.
At last the right car came and they hurried out into the roadway. As
Roger helped her in, he whispered:
"Till to-morrow--little wife."
The crowd on the step jostled her forward, the conductor, like a
specialized machine, bellowed his--"Step forward. Fare please. Step
forward. Plenty of room in the front of the car."
Through the jam on the back platform Anne looked back and glimpsed
Roger, already hurrying away, holding to his hat. A strange mingling of
fear and exultation rushed over her.
"Mrs. Roger Barton."
She tried to think of it calmly, as indifferently as any one of the
strangers in the car would have thought of it, but the realization
danced like electricity along her nerves.
* * * * *
Three-quarters of an hour later, Roger accepted the position of private
secretary to Hilary Wainwright, at fifty a week, the work to begin in
two weeks.