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140 know but what we better keep it secret, for a while. I didn't mean I'd tell my family just now. It would mean so much explaining—you not here, nor anything."

"Of course," he agreed. "Of course that would be the better way."

"I thought," she went on (she had it all nicely planned), "we might get married next Saturday, sometime—it takes a few days, I think, for licenses and papers and things—in the morning, perhaps, before I have taken my train for home." She stopped abruptly. "Would that—do you think that would be all right?"

"Is that the way you'd like it?"

"If you would. Yes, that's the way I'd like it."

"It's the way I would too, then."

There was a silence, a prolonged, significant silence, in which they were both keenly aware of a vague something that awed and frightened a little. It was Reba who broke the silence at last, a little hysterically.

"I'm sure I don't know just how one goes about doing what we're going to do—getting the papers, and making it lawful—and all that. Do you? And I don't know who to ask."

"You don't need to worry about that," Nathaniel assured her. "It's my end of the job. I'll see to that. There's a kind of clergyman fellow who's going to try a month or so of life with us on the 'Ellen T.' for his health—run down or something, I guess—and I'll ask him. He'll know. We'll have it right anyhow. I know the marriage ceremony—'solemnization of matrimony,' it's called—almost by heart," he went on. "I picked up a book, named Common