THE WEDDING-DAY.
MEAN to take care of you, my girl; leastways I'll do my best."
The words were spoken by a man of about twenty-five, in a workman's dress, as he led his bride in at the door of her future home.
"I know that," she answered, looking up almost wistfully, for there had been a different tone in the ending of his sentence to that in which it had begun.
"It's not such a place as I should like to ha' brought you to, Meg; but work's been slack, and—there, you know all that!"
Meg stepped in and looked around; her glance was shy and somewhat fearful. Should she be afraid to see what her young husband had prepared for her?
She clasped his hand tightly, and the firm pressure in return reassured her. Whatever it might be, love had done it from beginning to end.
For Meg had come out of the sweet country with its sunny meadows, and cowslips and buttercups. She had left, fifty miles away, the dear fragrant garden, where only this morning her mother had gathered such a posie as had never been seen before; she had left the cottage where every china mug and shepherdess was like a bit of her life; she had left the situation in the grand house at the end of her mother's garden, where she had lived for four years in the midst of every luxury. And this is what she had come to: two small rooms in a high London house, in one of the streets turning out of a wide but gone-down thoroughfare near London Bridge.
The rooms were on the second floor, and looked out front and back, and as her husband ushered her in and closed the door, she knew she had come home.