I was so touched by the poor thing's trouble that I almost forgot my own, and creeping up to her side I put my arm through hers as we knelt together, and that was how the Father found us when he turned to put the holy wafer on our tongues.
The wind must have risen higher while I was in the church, for when I was returning across the fields it lashed my skirts about my legs so that I could scarcely walk. A mist had come down and made a sort of monotonous movement in the mountains where they touched the vague line of the heavy sky.
I should be afraid to say that Nature was still trying to speak to me in her strange inarticulate voice, but I cannot forget that a flock of yearlings, which had been sheltering under a hedge, followed me bleating to the last fence, and that the moaning of the sea about St. Mary's Rock was the last sound I heard as I re-entered the house.
Everything there was running like a mill-race by this time. The servants were flying to and fro, my cousins were calling downstairs in accents of alarm, Aunt Bridget was answering them in tones of vexation, and my father was opening doors with a heavy push and closing them with a clash.
They were all so suddenly pacified when I appeared that it flashed upon me at the moment that they must have thought I had run away.
"Goodness gracious me, girl, where have you been?" said Aunt Bridget.
I told her, and she was beginning to reproach me for not ordering round the carriage, instead of making my boots and stockings damp by traipsing across the grass, when my father said:
"That'll do, that'll do! Change them and take a snack of something. I guess we're due at Holmtown in half an hour."
I ate my breakfast standing, the car was brought round, and by eight o'clock my father and I arrived at the house of the High Bailiff, who had to perform the civil ceremony of my marriage according to the conditions required by law.
The High Bailiff was on one knee before the fire in his office, holding a newspaper in front of it to make it burn.