CHAPTER XII.
"What had the fellow meant?" George puzzled over that point on his way back to N——town. It had been more than a mere ranting denunciation of the "rich man" as a "rich man". The indignation had been evidently personal to himself.
"If I'd been here, I'd not ha' let my wife sit at table wi' ye! It passes me that ye are not ashamed to come to this county again." How did the man know that he had ever been before?
To tell the truth, Mr. Sauls had once or twice felt in Meg's presence a little ashamed of a certain old story, though he did not regard the sins of his youth with the loathing that filled Barnabas Thorpe's soul at the thought of past backsliding.
Very few men's lives could be laid entirely open to the inspection of a good woman, George supposed; and he had never professed to be one of the "unco guid".
He grew angrier still with the preacher, at the thought of his ferreting out and telling Meg that tale, and he pictured the horror with which she would hear it.
George used to notice long ago with some amusement (he had often been privately amused with Miss Deane) that she was apt to be rather sweeping in her condemnations; seeing, in her extremely youthful innocence, only black and white, with no shades of grey between; judging with the crude severity that has not known temptation. It did not "amuse" him now to think of that.
That hypocrite would paint his portrait as a profligate, and a seducer of innocence; and Meg, looking at it all from a woman's point of view, would feel as if her hand had touched pitch in touching his.