"Good Grandmother!" I know I grew redder and redder as I walked. "I hope I don't have to see her again—the old thing!"
But I did, and that before many minutes had elapsed. For fetching back into the village by the ice-house and the back-side track, I was almost in collision with a hurrying shade in the dark under Dow's willows. It was Mary. I shall not forget the queer moment of suspense as she peered into my face, nor the touch of her fingers on my arm, nor the sigh.
"Oh—you're—you're the Means boy."
An embarrassment, pathetic only now in memory, came upon her.
"I—I wonder——" Her confusion grew more painful and her eyes went everywhere in the dark. "You don't happen to have seen any one—any—you haven't seen Mr. Blake, have you?"
"No!" I shook off the hand that still lay, as if forgotten, on my outraged arm. "What you want of him? He's no good!"
With that shot for parting I turned and stalked away. Behind me after a moment, I heard her cry of protest, dismal beyond words.
"Why do you say that, boy? What do you mean by that?"
Having meant nothing at all, except that I would have slain him gladly, I kept my bitter peace and held my way to the westward, leaving her to find her way and her soul in the blind, black shadows under the willow-trees.
No one who lived in Urkey Village then will forget the day it was known that Mary Matheson was going to marry Joshua Blake, at last. An isolated village is like an isolated person, placid-looking to dullness, but in reality almost idiotically emotional. More than anything else, when the news had run, it was like the camp-meeting conversion of a simple soul. First, for the "conviction of sin," there was the calling-up of all the dark, forgotten history, the whispered refurbishing of departed gossip, the ghosts of old angers. Then like the flood of Mercy, the assurance that all was well, having ended well. Everything was forgiven and forgotten, every one was to live happily ever after, and there must be a wedding.