The scene which had taken place under the roof of Doctor Yardley was soon known under that of Doctor Woolston.  Although the last individual was fully aware that Bridget was what was then esteemed rich, at Bristol, he cared not for her money.  The girl he liked well enough, and in secret even admired her as much as he could find it in his heart to admire anything of Doctor Yardley’s; but the indignity was one he was by no means inclined to overlook, and, in his turn, he forbade all intercourse between the girls.  These two bitter pills, thus administered by the village doctors to their respective patients, made the young people very miserable.  Bridget loved Anne almost as much as she loved Mark, and she began to pine and alter in her appearance, in a way to alarm her father.  In order to divert her mind, he sent her to town, to the care of an aunt, altogether forgetting that Mark’s ship lay at the wharves of Philadelphia, and that he could not have sent his daughter to any place, out of Bristol, where the young man would be so likely to find her.  This danger the good doctor entirely overlooked, or, if he thought of it at all, he must have fancied that his sister would keep a sharp eye on the movements of the young sailor, and forbid him her house, too.

Everything turned out as the Doctor ought to have expected.  When Mark joined his ship, of which he was now the first officer, he sought Bridget and found her.  The aunt, however, administered to him the second potion of the same dose that her brother had originally dealt out, and gave him to understand that his presence in Front street was not desired.  This irritated both the young people, Bridget being far less disposed to submit to her aunt than to her father, and they met clandestinely in the streets.  A week or two of this intercourse brought matters to a crisis, and Bridget consented to a private marriage.  The idea of again going to sea, leaving his betrothed entirely in the hands of those who disliked him for his father’s sake, was intolerable to Mark, and it made him so miserable, that the tenderness of the deeply enamoured girl could not withstand his appeals.  They agreed to get married, but to keep their union a secret until Mark should become of age, when it was hoped he would be in a condition, in every point of view, openly to claim his wife.

A thing of this sort, once decided on, is easily enough put in execution in America.  Among Mark’s college friends was one who was a few years older than himself, and who had entered the ministry.  This young man was then acting as a sort of missionary among the seamen of the port, and he had fallen in the way of the young lover the very first day of his return to his ship.  It was an easy matter to work on the good nature of this easy-minded man, who, on hearing of the ill treatment offered to his friend, was willing enough to perform the ceremony.  Everything being previously arranged, Mark and Bridget were married,