“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 impatience 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 ceremony 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 companion, 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 you 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 shops devoted to traffic in goods of the widest range of choice—­ handiworks of art, skill and fancy, products of nature and labour from every zone.