"Reverend Flip, dear," she began, "I want you to tell me something—truly, truly, truth now! Before it is too late. People shouldn't marry each other unless they're going to be quite honest with each other, should they?"
"No, dear," he answered. "Fire away."
"You're sure, quite sure, that you really want to marry me?" She abandoned her strangle-hold, and leaned down with her cheek on his hair, to make the telling of anything disagreeable more easy for him.
She felt him start, but he said, "Very sure, sweetheart."
"And you're not just being noble," she asked, wistfully, "like Jemmy thinks?"
Philip cried, "Jemima be darned!" and pulled her down into his arms quite roughly.
Her relief and gratitude pierced through the armor of his abstraction.
"Oh, Phil, you are sweet!" she whispered, holding him tight. "And I'll make up to you somehow for it. I will! I will!"
The wedding was more Jemima's idea of what such an affair should be than her own had been; with a bishop officiating, and a choir in surplices (rather weak-voiced and tearful, without their beloved leader) and a matron-of-honor in a very smart New York frock, and the little church crowded to its doors, and even spilling into the road beyond. Nor was the congregation entirely composed of country-folk, tenants and the like. There was quite a sprinkling of what Jemima called "worth-while people"; not only Jacqueline's victims, who came en masse and looking rather depressed, but Mrs. Lawton and her daughters and several other women whom Jemima had firmly brought to Storm (one could not be friends with young Mrs. Thorpe without being friends with her family as well) and who needed no urging to come a second time.
Well toward the front there sat another guest, whom the eye of the matron-of-honor encountered with some distaste; an unwashed-looking person with a peddler's pack on the floor at his feet, whose beaming, innocent gaze missed no detail of the ceremony. Brother Bates was in the habit of carrying up to Misty other things besides his stock in trade and the Word of God. Very little that occurred at Storm was unknown to the man he called "Teacher."