“Oh, I love it all,” she said.  “The scent of the gorse on the moors drove me wild, and the primroses under the hedges.  I am sure I was meant to be a farmer’s wife.”

This, with a tender, playful look at me.  Then she told the good news.  Lord Jeffreys had, for a certain round sum, given his ward permission to marry me.  There was a great to-do throughout the country about our wedding on Whit-Monday.  People came from more than thirty miles around, upon excuse of seeing Lorna’s beauty and my stature; but in good truth out of curiosity and a love of meddling.

It is impossible for any, who have not loved as I have, to conceive my joy and pride when, after the ring and all was done, and the parson had blessed us, she turned and gazed on me.  Her eyes were so full of faith and devotion that I was amazed, thoroughly as I knew them.  But when I stooped to kiss her, as the bridegroom is allowed to do, a shot rang through the church.  My darling fell across my knees, and her blood flowed out on the altarsteps.  She sighed a long sigh to my breast, and grew cold.  I laid her in my mother’s arms, and went forth for my revenge.

The men fell back before me.  Who showed me the course, I cannot tell.  I only know that I leaped upon a horse and took it.  Weapon of no sort had I. Unarmed, and wondering at my strange attire, I rode out to discover this:  whether in this world there be or be not a God of justice.  Putting my horse at a furious speed, I came upon Black Burrow Down, and there, a furlong before me, rode a man on a great black horse.  I knew that man was Carver Doone, bearing his child, little Ensie, before him.  I knew he was strong.  I knew he was armed with gun, pistol, and sword.  Nevertheless, I had no more doubt of killing him than a cook has of spitting a headless fowl.

I came up with him at Wizard’s Slough.  A bullet struck me somewhere, but I took no heed of that.  With an oak stick I felled his horse.  Carver Doone lay on the ground, stunned.  Leaping from my steed, I waited, and bared my arms as if in the ring for wrestling.  Then the boy ran towards me, clasped my leg, and looked up at me.

“Ensie, dear,” I said, “run and try to find a bunch of bluebells for the pretty lady.”

Presently Carver Doone gathered together his mighty limbs, and I closed with him.  He caught me round the waist with such a grip as had never been laid upon me.  I heard a rib go where the bullet had broken it.  But God was with me that day.  I grasped Carver Doone’s arm, and tore the muscle out of it; then I had him by the throat, and I left him sinking, joint by joint, into the black bog.

I returned to the farm in a dream, and only the thought of Lorna’s death, like a heavy knell, was tolling in the belfry of my brain.  Into the old farmhouse I tottered, like a weakling child, with mother helping me along, yet fearing, except by stealth, to look at me.

“I have killed him,” was all I said, “even as he killed Lorna.”