Then it was that Joyce, from her watch-tower of her window, saw Brossard driving home in the market-cart.  “Maybe I’ll have a chance to scare him while he is putting the horse up and feeding it,” she thought.  It was in the dim gloaming when she could easily slip along by the hedges without attracting attention.  Bareheaded, and in breathless haste to reach the barn before Brossard, she ran down the road, keeping close to the hedge, along which the wind raced also, blowing the dead leaves almost as high as her head.

Slipping through a hole in the hedge, just as Brossard drove in at the gate, she ran into the barn and crouched down behind the door.  There she wrapped herself in the sheet that she had brought with her for the purpose, and proceeded to strike a match to light the lantern.  The first one flickered and went out.  The second did the same.  Brossard was calling angrily for Jules now, and she struck another match in nervous haste, this time touching the wick with it before the wind could interfere.  Then she drew her dress over the lantern to hide the light.

“Wouldn’t Jack enjoy this,” she thought, with a daring little giggle that almost betrayed her hiding-place.

“I tell thee it is thy fault,” cried Brossard’s angry voice, drawing nearer the barn.

“But I tried,” began Jules, timidly.

His trembling excuse was interrupted by Brossard, who had seized him by the arm.  They were now on the threshold of the barn, which was as dark as a pocket inside.

Joyce, peeping through the crack of the door, saw the man’s arm raised in the dim twilight outside.  “Oh, he is really going to beat him,” she thought, turning faint at the prospect.  Then her indignation overcame every other feeling as she heard a heavy halter-strap whiz through the air and fall with a sickening blow across Jules’s shoulders.  She had planned a scene something like this while she worked away at the lantern that afternoon.  Now she felt as if she were acting a part in some private theatrical performance.  Jules’s cry gave her the cue, and the courage to appear.

As the second blow fell across Jules’s smarting shoulders, a low, blood-curdling wail came from the dark depths of the barn.  Joyce had not practised that dismal moan of a banshee to no purpose in her ghost dances at home with Jack.  It rose and fell and quivered and rose again in cadences of horror.  There was something awful, something inhuman, in that fiendish, long-drawn shriek.

Brossard’s arm fell to his side paralyzed with fear, as that same hoarse voice cried, solemnly:  “Brossard, beware!  Beware!” But worse than that voice of sepulchral warning was the white-sheeted figure, coming towards him with a wavering, ghostly motion, fire shooting from the demon-like eyes, and flaming from the hideous mouth.