'I'm going this way,' she said, motioning towards the beach.
'May I come too?'
'Of course you may,' she laughed, with a coquettish glance at him from under her long eyelashes; 'do you think I'd have mentioned it, if I hadn't meant you to come?
'Does father know you're a Roman?' she inquired suddenly, after a pause.
'Of course.'
'Then how is it he keeps you in the shop? I thought he was so bitter against your folks.'
'So he is; but there's no one else in the town as can hold a candle to me at the feel of the stuff. And old Paterson—I mean, Mr. Paterson, Miss—doesn't mix up his business with his religion, or he wouldn't be the smartest trader in the town, as he is now.'
Every Sunday after that they went to church together, and for their half-hour's stroll afterwards. She looked forward to the meeting as the one bright spot in her dull existence. Her starved heart was ripe for love; and soon her whole life became centred round the glow in this one young man's eyes. Her father knew nothing of what was happening. He attended the Wesleyan Chapel, where the service was half an hour longer, and always found his daughter at home when he arrived.
Old Paterson was a queer character in his way. His hard-featured face showed the Scotch blood that is so prevalent among the middle classes in the North of Ireland. His was a nature that had been warped by adversity. Somewhat late in life he married a wife whom he tenderly loved. After one short year of wedded happiness, she died in giving birth to Maggie. Up to the date of that crowning sorrow of his life, Paterson had been an ordinary church-goer, somewhat Low Church like the rest of his class. But from that moment onward his religion flowed in an ever bitterer and narrower stream. The emotional side of his nature, thwarted in one direction, expended itself fiercely in another. He became noted in the parish for his intolerance and rabid sectarianism. In him all the forces of Orangism, its opposition in race, class, and religion to the surrounding Papists, reached their fullest development.
Gradually his bigotry became too intense for the orthodox Church to hold him. He got himself elected a churchwarden for the mere purpose of thwarting the vicar at every turn. At last, when the harassed clergyman was nearly persecuted to death, that lack of humor which was an inherent element of Paterson's severely practical mind, delivered him from his enemy. Paterson's eye fell upon the church notice-board, and perceived that it was held in an Oxford frame, which was in the form of a cross. This was rank Popery, and not to be borne in a Protestant establishment. In all haste he summoned a vestry meeting, and proposed that the Oxford frame should have its ends sawn off and all resemblance to the accursed symbol removed. The vestry-meeting, composed chiefly of his friends, and Scotch like himself, gravely carried his proposal into effect. But the ridicule of the town descended upon the idea, and the mutilated notice-board remained for a testimony against him.