"The wild ducks would scream over one, and there would be the end of everything!" she remarked.
"Dunnot say it, lass! Ye'll not be wandering alone here when I'm not by, will 'ee?" cried the preacher, with a ring of pain in his voice; and her reassurances seemed barely to satisfy him. Timothy had filled him with forebodings, though he had also brought matters to a climax.
It was partly to turn the subject that Meg asked him one of the questions that had filled her mind during his preaching.
The preacher reddened, so that, under all the sunburn, she could see the flush mount to his forehead.
"There are things it goes against a man to talk about," he said. "My Master knows where He found me." But, after a few minutes, he added wistfully: "But an' ye care to hear, Margaret, I'd tell ye anything".
The story came out rather jerkily then, while they struggled against the wind. Meg, seeing the effort the telling caused, was sorry she had asked; was touched, too, with a painful feeling of compunction at the eagerness of his desire to more than meet hers.
Every now and then his speech was blown away from her; and once, when she lifted her face to listen, he paused a moment and said, with rather a sad smile: "But ye'll not understand it all, Margaret, any more than the snowflakes would". The snow was resting on her black hood at the time.
"When I was a boy, dad couldn't bear the sight o' me," he continued, stating the fact with an outspoken simplicity that was characteristic.
"It made him a bit sour to see me straight and hale, when Tom, as was worth a dozen o' me, was bent like a crooked stick. That was why I took to going over to Cousin Tremnell's whenever I could.
"Tom was keen on my getting schooling, though, and sent me over the marshes an' back every day, till I was too big a lad for any man to send. I wasn't fond o' learning, nor ain't now. It seems to me people stuff their minds too much wi' other men's thoughts. God's truth can't shine through the tangle, and they doan't give their own souls the room to stretch in. I cut the books and ran away to sea, when I was sixteen, wi' a cargo of oranges.