But on her way to church on the Sunday—thanksgiving was clearly due for her restored fortunes and the fast-falling flood—all her misery, which his Saturday silence had only intensified, melted away in a moment at the sound of his voice and the sight of his sling. To add to her rapture came the thought that, a turning later, she would have encountered Miss Gentry! But his exclamation: “Why, whatever became of you, Jinny? It’s been hell!” radiated so much heaven that the closing of his lips upon hers was almost a retrogression, perturbed as it was by her shyness in the open air. And, of course, she ought to have gone to the inn-yard where he had been waiting, she saw the moment he began explaining; that was the natural station for her cart to have come to. “Do forgive me making you suffer so,” she pleaded. “But I didn’t like to go in, with Mrs. Mott in that state!”

But Mrs. Mott had not been “in that state” he corrected almost laughingly. On the contrary, with her usual unexpectedness and extremism, she had reopened the bar immediately and served there herself in her handsomest dress, with the gold chain heaving once more on the bereaved bosom. Will himself had been forced to clink glasses with her. “He wouldn’t have liked to see us gloomy—like them Peculiars,” she had said. “He was always one for jollity and life.”

The anecdote enhanced the lovers’ own joy of life, and though Jinny steered for church (if by a zigzag path to avoid other worshippers) they never got out of the fir-grove, where a tree sapped by the flood presented a comparatively dry seat amid the sodden gull-haunted ways. Perhaps it was the thrushes that encouraged them—despite the dankness—to “stick to it, stick to it.” It was certainly more comfortable for kissing, Jinny shamelessly confessed, snuggling into the cloak he had bought to cover his sling. “When we stand up, you’re too proud to stoop,” she laughed blissfully. “You make me crane my neck up.”

“That’s only through the sling,” he apologized.

“Never mind—you’re not such a Goliath—nothing so tall as Elijah!”

His eyes blazed fiercely. “Why,” she laughed, “you don’t mind not being tall?”

“Of course not,” he said mendaciously. “Only you haven’t been measuring yourself against Elijah, I hope.”

“Measuring myself—?” she began, puzzled. Then her silvery laugh rippled out. “Oh, you jealous goose! But his size’ll be a bit awkward for Blanche, won’t it?” Then a sudden memory flushed both their faces, and hastily drawing a copy of the Chelmsford Chronicle from his pocket, he directed her attention to the thrilling accounts of the great flood and the greater funeral, and her fitful attempts to peruse them constituted the only rational moments of the morning.

It was odd how the reflection of events in the mighty Essex organ seemed to redouble their importance, and how even Will swelled in Jinny’s eyes when she saw him catalogued among “leading citizens” present at “the last obsequies of the popular proprietor of ‘The Black Sheep.’” And if Will failed to loom as large as Charley—whose death, fortunate in its journalistic opportunity, instead of being swamped by the flood, came as its climax—nevertheless he appeared in print no fewer than three times. The second occasion was the destruction of “The Flynt Flyer,” and this obituary was so long and complimentary that it almost made amends for his loss, even though he knew the details to be highly imaginative. In the third notice he owed his eminence to his father, who, Jinny learned with surprise, had been the beneficiary of a miracle. “Among the most singular of the effects produced by the Bradmarsh floods,” ran the paragraph that drew Caleb from the long obscurity of his seventy winters and which was as prolix and breathless as a sentence of Mrs. Purley’s, “may be cited the fact of a small cornstack some four yards long, recognized by a shepherd named Peartree as belonging to Mr. Caleb Flynt, of Frog Farm, father of Mr. William Flynt, the lamentable destruction of whose coach and horses under sensational circumstances is recorded in another column, having been lifted from its place by the waters that so suddenly burst upon this remote homestead; and, after floating about at their mercy, like a dismasted and rudderless ship, being deposited in safety in a higher field, wholly uninjured, save by the wet—in as firm and compact a condition as before the flood—and, apparently, without a single blade of straw in its body or its roof having been disturbed from its relative position, while other stacks in the same field, belonging to his former employer, Farmer Gale, were almost totally ruined.”

“Oh, Will, I’m so glad,” said Jinny. “I don’t mean about Farmer Gale.”

“I do. Mean hunks! Think what he paid dad all those years. But is it true about our stack, I wonder. Papers aren’t always correct.”

“Aren’t they?” She nestled closer.

“Oh dear no. You should have been in America! Haven’t you noticed it says Elijah rescued us? Such a mix-up with his housing us. That’s why I didn’t tell poor old dad till I could run up and see for myself.”

She moved back. “Oh, is that what you came for?”

“Of course not, darling. But being here, I may as well have a look.”

“Well, you’ll be able to, while I’m at church. I suppose you wouldn’t come,” she added shyly.

“Church?” he laughed. “Why, it’s nearly over!” He pointed to a pale, struggling sun that had well passed its zenith.