the key was, and Jack, he
come up almost the same moment I did, and I knew well enough he had
come to get that note out of her prayer-book for fear some one else
should see it.

'Here, I've got the key in my pocket,' says he, and with that he
opened the door, the bell clang, clang, clanging from the tower all
the time like as if the bellringer was drunk and had got a wager on
to get more beats out of the bell in half an hour than the next man.

Whoever it was that was ringing the bell--and I could give a pretty
good guess who it was--didn't seem to hear us coming, and they went
up the aisle and pulled back the red baize curtain that hides the
bottom of the tower where the ringers stand on Sundays, and there
was Mattie with her old green gown on, and her hair all loose and
down her back with the hard work of bellringing, I suppose, and her
face as white as the bald-faced stag as is painted on the sign down
at the inn in the village. And directly she saw Jack, I knew it was
all over, for she let go the rope and it swung up like a live thing
over our heads, and she made two steps to Jack and had him round the
neck before them all.

'O Jack!' she cried, 'don't look like that.

I came to fetch your letter, and somebody locked me in.'

Jack, he turned to me, and his face was so that I should have been
afraid to have been along of him in a lonely place.

'This is your doings,' says he, 'and all that pack of lies you told
me was out of your own wicked head.'

He had got his arm round her, and was holding on as if she was
something worth having, instead of a silly girl in a frock three
year old.

'I don't know what you mean, I'm sure,' I said; 'it was only a
joke.'

'A joke!' says he. 'Lies, I call it, and I know they're lies by the
very touch of her in my arm here.'

'Oh, well!' I said, 'if you can't take joking better than this, it's
the last time I'll ever try joking with you.'

And I walked out of the church, and the other folks who had run up
to see what was the matter come out with me. And they two was left
alone.

I suppose it was only human nature that, as I come round the church,
I should get on the top of a tombstone and look in to see what they
was doing. It was the little window where a pane was broken by a
stone last summer, and so I heard what they was saying. He was
trying to tell her what I had told him--quite as much for her own
good as for mine, as you have seen; but she didn't seem to want to