“It was Olive who understood it first,” she said gravely. “She is so much quicker than I am and saw it all in a flash; a flash of moonlight, as she said. I could only go away and think things out slowly and stupidly by myself; but I got there at last.”

“Do you mean,” asked Michael slowly, “that Olive Ashley also has–got there?”

“Yes,” she replied, “and the odd thing is that John Braintree doesn’t seem to mind a bit. At least a good many people would think it odd; they are married now and they seem to agree about almost everything. I wonder how much there really was for good people to disagree about in those quarrelsome old times.”

“I know,” he answered. “Everybody seems to be married. And it has made me feel pretty lost and lonely in the last month or so.”

“Even Monkey is married, I hear,” she said. “It seems like the end of the world. But perhaps its the beginning of the world. One thing you may be sure of, though lots of people would laugh at it. Whenever Monks come back, marriages will come back.”

“He went back to that seaside town and married Dr. Hendry’s daughter,” explained Michael Herne rather vaguely. “We parted by a sort of silent consent at Seawood Abbey and he went west and I east. I had to go and look for you alone: and I was very much alone.”

“You say ‘was,’” she said with a smile; and they suddenly moved towards each other and met as they had met in the garden long ago–in a silence full of many things; a silence which he broke by saying suddenly, in his abrupt and awkward way: “I suppose I am a heretic.”

“We will see about all that,” she said with a serene magnificence.

Herne’s thoughts abruptly and absently went back to the old tangled talk between himself and Archer about the Albigensian heresy and what need to follow conversion from it; he stood a moment with his wits wool gathering. Then in that narrow street of the coloured lantern a new and astonishing thing happened; something that never had happened in all the topsy turvey happenings of his historical career. Michael Herne laughed. For the first time in his life he seriously saw a joke and deliberately made it. It is typical of him that his one joke was one which nobody else could see, or would probably ever understand.

“I say . . . iit in matrimonium.”