“How clever of you!” she said, with a fairly successful effort to be calm.

“Good morning, my child,” said Mr. Prohack, with a similar and equally successful effort.  “So you’re cleaning Mr. Morfey’s flat for him.”

“Yes.  And not before it needed it.  Do come in and shut the door.”  Mr. Prohack obeyed, and Sissie shed her pinafore apron.  “Now we’re quite private.  I think you’d better kiss me.  I may as well tell you that I’m fearfully happy—­much more so than I expected to be at first.”

Mr. Prohack again obeyed, and when he kissed his daughter he had an almost entirely new sensation.  The girl was far more interesting to him than she had ever been.  Her blush thrilled him.

“You might care to glance at that,” said Sissie, with an affectation of carelessness, indicating a longish, narrowish piece of paper covered with characters in red and black, which had been affixed to the wall of the passage with two pins.  “We put it there—­at least I did—­to save trouble.”

Mr. Prohack scanned the document.  It began:  “This is to certify—­” and it was signed by a “Registrar of births, deaths, and marriages.”

“Yesterday, eh?” he ejaculated.

“Yes.  Yesterday, at two o’clock. Not at St George’s and not at St Nicodemus’s....  Well, you can say what you like, dad—­”

“I’m not aware of having said anything yet,” Mr. Prohack put in.

“You can say what you like, but what did you expect me to do?  It was necessary to bring home to some people that this is the twentieth century, not the nineteenth, and I think I’ve done it.  And anyway what are you going to do about it?  Did you seriously suppose that I—­I—­was going through all the orange-blossom rigmarole, voice that breathed o’er Eden, fully choral, red carpet on the pavement, flowers, photographers, vicar, vestry, Daily Picture, reception, congratulations, rice, old shoes, going-away dress, ‘Be kind to her, Ozzie.’  Not much!  And I don’t think.  They say that girls love it and insist on it.  Well, I don’t, and I know some others who don’t, too.  I think it’s simply barbaric, worse than a public funeral.  Why, to my mind it’s Central African; and that’s all there is to it.  So there!” She laughed.

“Well,” said Mr. Prohaek, holding his hat in his hand.  “I’m a tolerably two-faced person myself, but for sheer heartless duplicity I give you the palm.  You can beat me.  Has it occurred to you that this dodge of yours will cost you about fifty per cent of the wedding presents you might otherwise have had?”

“It has,” said Sissie.  “That was one reason why we tried the dodge.  Nothing is more horrible than about fifty per cent of the wedding presents that brides get in these days.  And we’ve had the two finest presents anybody could wish for.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, Ozzie gave me Ozzie, and I gave him me.”

“I suppose the idea was yours?”