Barnabas pushed back his chair, and followed him.
Mr. Thorpe got up too; and resumed the restless pace up and down that had been broken into by his new daughter-in-law's advent. She sat twisting the ring on her thin finger, and wondering whether the preacher was telling the whole story now, and what his brother thought of it. As it happened, she was not left long in doubt on that score.
The tap of Tom's sticks sounded again along the stone passage; he was talking eagerly; when he almost reached the door, she heard his final dictum: "E—eh, lad! Now, I doan't know on my soul which was th' biggest fule, you or she!"
So Meg was brought to Barnabas Thorpe's kin; and, sitting alone in her room, looked over the wide marshes that were to become familiar to her; and knew herself a stranger in a strange land.
It was two months since she had become his wife in name; and the two months' experience had made its mark on her,—a mark so deep that she believed herself to be hardly recognisable—a different woman altogether.
Her face had sharpened in outline, and deepened in expression; the girlish beauty of colour had faded, and she had cut off her abundant soft hair.
They had travelled from village to village, the girl sometimes walking, sometimes getting a lift in passing carts, never owning to weariness, or pain, or discomfort; but living, apparently, on the preacher's preaching.
Her zeal had outstripped his, burning like a devouring flame. She had sung at meetings; she had gone with him everywhere unshrinkingly; she had given away the very food she should have eaten. And the man had watched her; first with amazement, then with an overgrowing sense of uneasiness; never quite understanding what revelations of good and evil he had brought her face to face with, or how desperately she was clinging to her religious faith, as a child, frightened in the dark, clings to its father's hand.
Meg had been not only innocent, but more ignorant of some phases of evil than would have been possible in a woman of the preacher's own class. Her brain had nearly reeled with the shock of new experiences; her horror at much she had seen and heard had often kept her awake when her body was tired out; and when she slept, her sleep had been haunted with dreams that exhausted her as much as wakefulness. The supernatural grew very real to her then; she was happy only when Barnabas was praying or preaching; she was feverishly eager, growing bigger eyed and thinner day by day.