But with a peremptory gesture the Quakeress had stopped the word in her mouth.

“Nay!” she said loudly, “do not pollute that sacred name by letting it pass through thy lips.  Women such as thou were not made for motherhood....  Thy own mother knew that, when she took thy children from thee and cursed thee on her death-bed for thy sins and for thy shame!  Thy sons were honest, God-fearing men, but ’tis no thanks to thee.  Thou alone hast heaped shame upon their dead father’s name and hast contrived to wreak ruin on the sons who knew thee not.”

The Quakeress paused a moment, her pale opaque eyes lighted with an inward glow of wrath and of satisfied vengeance.  She and her dead friend and all their co-religionists had hated the woman, who, in defiance of her own Puritanic upbringing, had cast aside her friends and her home in order to throw herself in that vortex of pleasure, which her mother considered evil and infamous.

Together they had all rejoiced over this woman’s subsequent humiliation, her sorrow and longing for her children, the ceaseless search, the ever-recurrent disappointments.  Now the Quakeress’s hour had come, hers and that of the whole of the dour sect who had taken it upon itself to punish and to avenge.

Editha, shamed and miserable, not even daring now to approach her own son and to beg for affection with a look, stood quite rigid and pale, allowing the torrent of the old woman’s pent-up hatred to fall upon her and to crush her with its rough cruelty.

Squire Boatfield would have interposed.  He had glanced at the various documents—­the proofs of what the old woman had asserted—­and was satisfied that the horrible tale of what seemed to him unparalleled cruelty was indeed true, and that the narrow bigotry of a community had succeeded in performing that monstrous crime of parting this wretched woman for twenty years from her sons.

Vaguely in his mind, the kindly squire hoped that he—­as magistrate—­could fitly punish this crime of child-stealing, and the expression with which he now regarded the old Quakeress was certainly not one of good-will.

Mistress Lambert had, in the meanwhile, approached Editha.  She now took the younger woman’s hand in hers and dragged her towards the coffin.

“There lies one of thy sons,” she said with the same relentless energy, “the eldest, who should have been thy pride, murdered in a dark spot by some skulking criminal....  Curse thee! ... curse thee, I say ... as thy mother cursed thee on her death-bed ... curse thee now that retribution has come at last!”

Her words died away, as some mournful echo against these whitewashed walls.

For a moment she stood wrathful and defiant, upright and stern like a justiciary between the dead son and the miserable woman, who of a truth was suffering almost unendurable agony of mind and of heart.

Then in the midst of the awesome silence that followed on that loudly spoken curse, there was the sound of a firm footstep on the rough deal floor, and the next moment Michael Richard de Chavasse was kneeling beside his mother, and covering her icy cold hand with kisses.