They had arrived late at an inn; and Meg, too tired to eat, had exerted herself to amuse a fretful child, who was sitting beside her on a bench.
She seldom spoke to strangers, but, at that moment, she had experienced a sudden and almost overpowering distaste for her surroundings. The hot, tobacco-reeking room, the smell of food, the noise every one made in eating, the way the men spat on the floor, and the way the woman next her laughed, affected her with a physical loathing. She fought desperately against the sensation, having a nervous fear that, should she once stop talking, and let herself go, she might break down altogether. Her cheeks flushed with the heat of the room, her eyes shone like stars, and her tongue went faster and faster. The child stared at her, open-mouthed; the child's mother looked at her rather inquisitively; but the father, a young mechanic, put down his knife and fork, and tried to draw the stranger's attention to himself.
All at once Meg was startled by the preacher's pushing back his chair noisily, and putting a hand on her shoulder.
"If ye can't eat, there's no call for 'ee to stop here chattering. Ye'd better go upstairs," he said.
His voice sounded a little thick, and his face was flushed, though he never drank anything but water.
Meg turned and looked at him in utter astonishment; then rose and left them without a word.
It had been nothing to speak of, nothing to make a fuss about, yet when she had found herself alone in the tiny room upstairs that he had taken for her, she had hidden her face in her hands with an indescribable feeling of shame.
"What right had this man to speak so to her,—to look at her as if he were jealous? He might, in his capacity of preacher, have reproved her for breaking any law in the decalogue, and she would not have been angry; but this was quite different."
Alas! it did not bear thinking of. She had given him "right" enough!
She had felt she could not sit still; the restlessness that had been growing on her had made anything more bearable than the quiet of her room. She had put on her bonnet, and gone down again almost immediately.