I just looked at him again, and he put his arm round me and gave me a good kiss. I had to put up with it, though I never could see any sense in that sort of stuff. Then we walked home together, very slow, his arm round me.
I daresay some people will think I oughtn't to have acted so, taking away another girl's fellow. But I was quite sure she would get plenty that would play love in a cottage with her, and she did not seem to appreciate her blessings in getting a man that was well off, and I didn't see how it could be found out, as he was going away next day.
Now, it would all have gone as well as well if I had had the sense to offer to see him off at the station, and I ought to have had the sense to see him well out of the place. But we all make mistakes sometimes. Mine was in saying 'Good-bye' to him at the corner of the four-acre and going home by myself, leaving him with three-quarters of an hour for 'Satan to find some mischief still for idle hands to do' in.
I said 'Good-bye' to him, and he kissed me, and gave me the address where to write, and told me what to do.
'For I shan't have no truck with your uncle,' says he. 'I marries my wife, and I takes her right away.'
It wasn't till I was going up the stairs, untying my bonnet-strings as I went, and smoothing out the ribbons with my finger and thumb, for it was my best, that it come to me all in a minute that I had left Mattie locked up in that church. It was very tiresome, and how to get her out I didn't know. But I thought maybe she would be trying some of the other doors, and I might turn the key gently and away again before she could find out it was unlocked.
So up to the church I went, very hot, and a setting sun, and having had no tea or anything, and as I began to climb the hill my heart stood still in my veins, for I heard a sound from the church as I never expected to hear at that time of the day and week.
'O Lord!' I thought, 'she's tried every other way, and now she's ringing the bell, and she'll fetch up the whole village, and what will become of me?'
I made the best haste I could, but I could see more than one black dot moving up the hill before me that showed me folks on their way home had heard the bell and was going to see what it meant. And when I got up there they were trying the big door of the church, not knowing it was the little side one where the key was, and Jack, he come up almost the same moment I did, and I knew well enough he had come to get that note out of her prayer-book for fear some one else should see it.
'Here, I've got the key in my pocket,' says he, and with that he opened the door, the bell clang, clang, clanging from the tower all the time like as if the bellringer was drunk and had got a wager on to get more beats out of the bell in half an hour than the next man.