“Be sure I will ask you,” she said, with the pity that her own heart-loneliness had taught her in her voice.  “I can’t understand what it is that you think may happen; it seems to me as if—­” She broke off, held by the thought that disaster could hardly have another arrow in its quiver for her.  “You may be sure if I think you can help me, I will ask you.  I know I could rely on you,” she said, pushing back her own trouble, meeting his wild eyes with hers, steadfast and compassionate.

“I’m more than thankful—­grateful—­you’ve only to speak—­” he stumbled and stammered with words that were all inadequate to his feeling.  “I won’t detain you; I’m taking your time too long as it is—­and I’ll have a job to get home too, the river’s rising every minute, and so is the storm—­” He somehow talked himself out of the room.

Christian returned to her work of destruction.  The situation in general had not been made easier for her by Barty’s tragic offer of assistance in some mysterious and advancing stress, or by the certainty that she tried to shake, but could not, of what his eyes had said to her.

But Barty, as he drove home through the storm, felt himself to be a new man, consecrate and apart, ennobled by her promise to rely on him, glorified by her look; and thanked God that, when the trouble came, she would remember that he had had neither part nor lot in it.

CHAPTER XXXIX

The storm, and the preparations for the wedding, raged on with almost equal violence, within and without the walls of No. 6, The Mall.  From the moment that daylight began on the fateful Wednesday, the day before the wedding, and until it ceased, Mrs. Mangan’s face recurred at the window of the dining room, full of protest, primarily against the arbiter of the weather, who had sent so supreme a hindrance to all her preparations, secondarily, against the shops of Cluhir, whose dilatoriness in matters of the highest importance “had her,” so she affirmed frequently, “that much distracted, that it would be a comfort and a consolation to her if she were stretched cold in her grave.”

At intervals during the feverish day, beings would come rushing through the torrents, like trout in a swirling brook, and would fling themselves and their parcels in through the door that Mrs. Mangan was generally ready to open for them.  Frantic messages from bridesmaids about their costumes, belated wedding presents, all the surf and foam that is flung up by the waves of a wedding, broke upon No. 6.  The bride elect, pale and preoccupied, ("pale,” that is to say, “for Tishy,” as one of her compeers observed, “flushed for any one else!”) wrote notes, and exhibited presents, and packed clothes, and rode the tempest with a fortitude that was worthy of the Big Doctor’s daughter.  But even Tishy began to fail as darkness drew in.

“I can’t stand this house any more,” she said to her mother, “rain or no rain, I’m going out!  I didn’t see Mrs. Whelply about Kathleen’s” wreath that she wrote about—­”