"Yes, Rose Ellen!" cried the minister. They were still standing in the passage, and he was still holding her hands, and it was quite absurd, only neither of them seemed to realize it.
"I have always wanted you, but I have only just found it out. I cannot live at all without you: I have been only half alive since you went away. I want you for my own, for always."
"Oh, you can have me!" cried Rose Ellen, and the blue eyes brimmed over altogether with happy shining tears. "Oh, I was yours all the time, only I didn't know you—I didn't know—"
She faltered, and then hurried on. "It—it wasn't only that I was scared about mother, Mr. Lindsay. I couldn't stay away from—oh, some said—some said you were going to be married, and I couldn't bear it, no, I couldn't!"
But when Charles Lindsay heard that, he drew Rose Ellen by both hands into the study, and shut the door. And only the lizard knew what happened next.
It was a month later.
There had been a wedding, the prettiest wedding that the village had ever seen. The whole world seemed turned to roses, and the sweetest rose of all, Rose Ellen Lindsay, had gone away on her husband's arm, and Deacon Strong and Deacon Todd were shaking hands very hard, and blowing peals of joy with their pocket-handkerchiefs. Mrs. Mellen had preserved her usual calm aspect at the wedding, and looked young enough to be her own daughter, "some said," in her gray silk and white straw bonnet. But when it was all over, the wedding party gone, and the neighbours scattered to their homes again, Sophronia Mellen did a strange thing. She went round deliberately, and opened every window of her house. The house stood quite apart, with only the two houses close beside it on either hand, and no others till you came quite into the street itself. She opened every window to its utmost. Then she took a tin pan, and a pair of tongs, and leaned out of the front parlour window, and screamed three times, at the top of her lungs, beating meanwhile with all her might upon the pan. Then she went to the next window, and screamed and banged again, and so on all over the house. There were twenty windows in her house, and by the time she had gone the round, she was crimson and breathless. Nevertheless, she managed to put her last breath into a shriek of such astounding volume that the windows fairly rang. One last defiant clang of the tongs on the tin pan and then she sat down quietly by the back parlour window, and settled herself well behind the curtain, and prepared to enjoy herself thoroughly. "They shall have their fill this time!" she murmured to herself; "and I shall get all the good of it."
For some minutes there was dead silence: the event had been too awful to be treated lightly. At length a rustling was heard, and very cautiously a sharp nose, generously touched with colour, was protruded from the window of the left-hand house.
"Mis' Bean," said the owner of the nose. "Be you there?"