In half an hour John Arniston was at the mortuary. Of course, he found a
pressman there with a notebook before him. With him he arranged what
should be said the next morning, and how the inquest should be reported.
There was no doubt about the identity, and John Arniston soon possessed
the proofs of it. But, after all, there was no need that the British
public should know more than it already knew, or that the name of Miriam
Gale should be connected with the drowned wretch, whose soddenly
friendly leer struck John Arniston cold, as though he also had been in
the Thames water that night.

So all through the darkness he paced in front of the house of the
Beloved. His letter to her, written on leaves of his notebook, in place
of that which he had destroyed, went in with the morning's milk. In half
an hour after he was with her. And when he came out again he had seen a
wonderful thing--a beautiful woman to whom emotion was life, and the
expression of it second nature, running through the gamut of twenty
moods in a quarter of an hour. At the end, John departed in search of a
licence and a church. And Miriam Gale put her considering finger to her
lip, and said, "Let me see--which dresses shall I take?"

The highway robbery was never heard of. The excellent plaster which John
Arniston left in the hand of the official had salved effectively the
rude constriction of his throat, where John's right hand had closed upon
it.

* * * * *

It was even better to sit with Miriam Arniston in reality in the great
sun-lit square of St. Mark's than it had been in fantasy with Miriam
Gale.