The tide had come up while John Chidlaw was telling his story, and his little boat slid off the bar directly, when, taking up the oars, he soon brought her to land.
"Bless your dear heart, John!" says Rose, pointing back to the boat's name, as he handed her ashore, "would you believe I was so stupid as not to see that the name o' your wessel was the same as my own? I read it the Rose Rolling, to be sure!"
But John maintained that she was not stupid a single bit nor mite, but, on the contrary, smart altogether beyond the common. "To come so nigh the truth," says he, "and yet not get hold on 't, arter all, is a leetle the slickest thing yet!"
And then he told, as they walked home together,—he with three bandboxes in one arm, and her on the other,—all about his weary years of hardship and poverty, and all about the beginning of his good fortune, the running away of the horse and of the little girl who drew him after her, because she reminded him so much of Rose herself as she used to be when he looked down upon her so fondly from the roof in Baker's Row,—told her of the child's father, and how he set him up in business,—of his prosperity since, ending with her taking passage with him, which he said was the best fortune of all.
"That was luck," says he, "that no words can shadder forth!" And then he said, "I oughtn't to call it luck, my dear; it was just an intervention of Divine Providence!" Then he corrected himself. "An interwention o' Diwine Providence," says he,—"that's what it was!" And he hugged the very bandboxes till he fairly stove them in.
About a month after this blessed luck, the milliner's shop was closed one day at an unusually early hour, and the white-muslin curtains at the parlor windows above might have been noticed to nutter and sway, as with some gay excitement indoors. And so indeed there was. John had taken his Rose for good and all, and the little parlor was full of glad hearts and merry feet. All the milliner's apprentices and sewing-girls of the neighborhood were there, bright as so many butterflies, laughing, and nodding, and whispering one another, and dropping their eyes before the young sailors, and teamsters, and other fine fellows, who were serving them with a generosity that was only equalled by their admiration. Coffee, cakes, cheese, chowder, bottled beer, fruits, and hot bannocks,—the lasses had them all at once, and the lads would have been glad to give them even more.
And John, grown ten years younger that day, kept all the while (being forced to turn his head away now and then to receive congratulations) one foot under the table, and against the soft slipper and silken stocking of Rose, lest at any moment she might be caught up into heaven, and so vanish out of his sight; and she, in turn, kept fond watch of him, pressing the oranges upon him with almost importunate solicitude. Perhaps she remembered that one which he had parted with for her sake, when he used to look down upon her from the roof of Baker's Row with such hopeless and helpless admiration.