I Forbid the Banns! — page 144: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

134 ‘7 FORBID THE BANNS!” have been in many a warm quarter since he left us, and we'll not have him sit a-shivering.’ ”’ The light from the logs and the soft English twilight mingled in the room. He saw his father and his mother smiling on him as they had done years before. ‘The pic- | tures had a new interest inhiseyes. His fatherand mother had met at the place where he had seen Bertha for the first time. : He had originally been impressed with his meeting Ber- tha because he knew that their meeting had taken place where his father had first met his mother. But now he was gazing at their portraits with renewed interest because they had met where he had first seen Bertha. He kept his eyes fixed on them until nothing was left of the twilight but a blue patch in an opening in the lower boughs of a great elm on the furthest brink of the lawn. The red flickering fire light now and again touched the canvases, and then went flying around the polished surface of the black oak panels, brought by the major of dragoons from the Low Countries. With the darkness there came to him an overwhelming loneliness—such a loneliness as he had never felt in all his life before. She was away from him. She had become a part of his life—the better part of his life. It seemed to him that there had never been a time in his life when he had not known her. Every hour during the past seventeen days—only seventeen days !—she had been in his thoughts. And she was his own! She would soon always be with him—always by his side—always within reach of his lips! The thought sent the blood coursing strongly through his veins ; but the thought gave him no pleasure, for it came to him wedded with another thought : ‘‘What would the originals of those two paintings say if (CONMIELIOOKS (C6) m