Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/163



ORRIE THROSSEL'S marriage to Owen Stor- row took place one rainy day early in October. It took place under conditions which were any- thing but exhilarating, proving of a nature that tended to persuade the groom that Torrie's original attitude to- wards such ceremonies was not altogether an absurd one. From those moments which were to bring a wife to his arms he was able to extract scant suggestion of a goddess stepping from a cloud, scant semblance to a rare and beautiful rite being beautifully consummated.

Over it all, in the first place, was an inalienable taint of the surreptitious. It carried with it, in fact, the stub- born and disturbing sense of a smuggling expedition somewhat hastily planned and somewhat lugubriously carried out. Storrow, as he stared out the rain-streaked window of his day-coach on a side-line in New Jersey, with Torrie veiled and apprehensive-eyed at his elbow, found it hard to accept the expedition as something not in defiance of the law but in accord with it. They had taken advantage of her more or less tenuous friendship with a friend of a friend of a justice of the peace, in a remoter town, who had announced his willingness to make things smooth for them, though this involved a none too inviting train-trip, a tiresome wait at a junction- point, a stupidly prolonged tour of investigation in a dripping and odoriferous " cab," and a half hour of solemn jocularity and dissimulated high tension in an un- speakably disordered and stuffy office which smelt of mouldy calf -skin and stale tobacco inextricably blended. 153