"You will find my father?" Her face brightened and flushed for a second, and then rather a painful look crossed it, and she shook her head.
"Aunt Russelthorpe will see him first," she said; "so it is of no use."
No stranger could ever understand how much despair there was in that last sentence.
"Then there's just naught else possible," said the man: and she bent her head in assent.
She did not see him again till she saw him in the church, where they exchanged vows. Mrs. Cuxton gave her away with grim disapproval.
The guest whom the sea had brought in the early dawn, and who had spent two whole days under her roof, had charmed the heart out of the woman like a white witch.
Meg's fineness and slenderness touched the big fish-wife. Meg's sweet smile, the manner that was her father's, and her pretty voice, when she sat singing the whole of one morning to the little cripple lad whose life Barnabas Thorpe had once saved, were all part of the witchery. During the whole of her chequered life there were always some people (and generally people of a very opposite type to her own) who were inclined to give her that peculiarly warm and instinctive service that has something of the romance of loyalty in it; her home had been somewhat over-cold, but more than once the gift of love, unexpected and unasked, was held out by strange hands as she passed by.
It was a gusty morning, and the break of the waves sounded all through the short service when Meg was married. She paused when they stood on the steps of the church and looked across the sea,—a long look—(somewhere on the other side of that water was her father); then they went inside.
The bride had on a close-fitting plain straw bonnet that Mrs. Cuxton had bought in the village, and her white dress was simpler than what might have been worn by a woman of the preacher's own class; but the old clergyman who was to tie the knot (blind and sleepy though he was) peered hard at her, then looked at Barnabas Thorpe uncertainly. They were a strangely matched couple, he thought. If Meg had seemed frightened he would possibly have spoken; but when her courage was at the sticking-point she did not hesitate, and nothing would have induced her to show the white feather then. It was a plainly furnished church, small and light. The walls were whitewashed, the communion table was covered with a much-patched cloth. It was so small that the fishermen seemed almost to fill it.
They were a deeply interested congregation. All of them knew the preacher; many of them were bound to him by close ties.