Mrs. Tremnell had an aimless manner of fluttering about on tip-toe in a sick-room,—a habit which set Meg's nerves on edge, and which it taxed all her self-command to endure without signs of impatience; but the preacher's heavy tread never jarred on her. He always knew exactly what he meant to do in small as well as in big things; and both his decision and his strength were restful.
Possibly, if she had owed him less, she would have drawn near to loving him.
She had fancied when first taken ill that she was going to die.
The shivering and burning, which left her daily weaker, which wearied and exhausted her, would, she suspected, very effectually solve all the difficulties that surrounded Barnabas and herself. But, after all, her youth asserted itself. A spell of sharp, fresh weather seemed to give her new life; the attacks of fever became shorter; and, very much to her own surprise, she recognised that she was—albeit painfully and with many relapses—getting better!
She had been kept to the house for weeks; but there was no doubt as to her convalescence, when, on one fine afternoon in September, Barnabas carried her into the fields, where she lay under a rick watching the men at work, the soft pink of returning health in her cheeks, her eyes soft with pleasure at the wonder of summer growth and sweetness.
Meg had not much wished to live; but, after all, the world was beautiful!
As she sat leaning against the rick, watching the in-gathering of the scanty crop, listening to the rough voices a little mellowed by distance, the preacher's wife knew that both place and people had now a warm corner in her heart.
Her gaze wandered past the low boundary fence, far away over the flats. How often she had run out of the house and down to the field to look at that view!
She had thought that she should not see it again; and, even now, while sitting there, a dreamy presentiment, that she could not shake off, came over her.
She felt as if she had got to the bottom of a page,—a page on which such strange things had been written, both good and bad. Efforts, desperate at times, to adapt herself to circumstances, failures sudden and overwhelming, courage lost—and found again.