Her voice broke down now in a sob, her throat seemed choked, but with an effort which seemed indeed amazing in one of her years, she controlled her tears, and for a moment was silent.  The gray twilight crept in through the door of the cottage, where Mat, bareheaded and humble, still waited for the order to go.

Sir Marmaduke would have interrupted the old woman’s talk ere this, but his limbs were now completely paralyzed:  he might have been made of stone, so rigid did he feel himself to be:  a marble image, or else a specter, a shadow-figure that existed yet could not move.

There was such passionate earnestness in the old woman’s words that everyone else remained dumb.  Richard, whose heart was filled with dread, who had endured agonies of anxiety since the disappearance of his brother, had but one great desire, which was to spare to the kind soul a knowledge which would mean death or worse to her.

As for Editha de Chavasse, she was a mere spectator still:  so puzzled, so bewildered that she was quite convinced at this moment, that she must be mad.  She could not encounter Marmaduke’s eyes, try how she might.  The look in his face horrified her less than it mystified her.  She alone—­save the murderer himself—­knew that the man who lay in that deal coffin out there was not the mysterious foreigner who had never existed.

But if not the stranger, then who was it, who was dead? and what had Adam Lambert to do with the whole terrible deed?

Sue once more tried to lead Mistress Lambert gently away, but she pushed the young girl aside quite firmly: 

“Ye don’t believe me?” she asked, looking from one face to the other, “ye don’t believe me, yet I tell ye all that Adam is innocent ... and that the Lord will not allow the innocent to be unjustly condemned....  Aye!  He will e’en let the dead arise, I say, and proclaim the innocence of my lad!”

Her eyes—­with dilated pupils and pale opaque rims—­had the look of the seer in them now; she gazed straight out before her into the rain-laden air, and it seemed almost as if in it she could perceive visions of avenging swords, of defending angels and accusing ghouls, that she could hear whisperings of muffled voices and feel beckoning hands guiding her to a world peopled by specters and evil beings that prey upon the dead.

“Let me pass!” she said with amazing vigor, as Squire Boatfield, with kindly concern, tried to bar her exit through the door, “let me pass I say! the dead and I have questions to ask of one another.”

“This is madness!” broke in Marmaduke de Chavasse with an effort; “that body is not a fit sight for a woman to look upon.”

He would have seized the Quakeress by the arm in order to force her back, but Richard Lambert already stood between her and him.

“Let no one dare to lay a hand on her,” he said quietly.

And the old woman escaping from all those who would have restrained her, walked rapidly through the doorway and down the flagged path rendered slippery with the sleet.  The gale caught the white wings of her coif, causing them to flutter about her ears, and freezing strands of her gray locks which stood out now all round her head like a grizzled halo.