She found them, and with infinite difficulty—­holding match after match in her left hand—­she scrawled a few blotted lines on a torn piece of paper.  She was a poor scholar, and the toil was great.  When it was done, she propped the paper up against the looking-glass.

Then she felt for her dress, and deliberately put it on again, in the dark, though her hands were so numb with cold that she could scarcely hook the fastenings.  Her teeth chattered as she threw her old shawl round her.

Stooping down she took off her boots, and pushing the bolt of her own door back as noiselessly as possible, she crept down the stairs.  As she neared the lower door, the sound of two or three loud breathings caught her ear.

Her heart contracted with an awful sense of loneliness.  Her husband slept—­her children slept—­while she—­

Then the wave of a strange, a just passion mounted within her.  She stepped into the kitchen, and walking up to her husband’s chair, she stood still a moment looking at him.  The lamp was dying away, but she could still see him plainly.  She held herself steadily erect; a frown was on her brow, a flame in her eyes.

‘Well, good-bye, Isaac,’ she said, in a low but firm voice.

Then she walked to the back door and opened it, taking no heed of noise; the latch fell heavily, the hinges creaked.

‘Isaac!’ she cried, her tones loud and ringing,—­Iaac!’

There was a sudden sound in the kitchen.  She slipped through the door, and ran along the snow-covered garden.

Isaac, roused by her call from the deep trance of exhaustion which only a few minutes before had fallen upon his misery, stood up, felt the blast rushing in through the open door at the back, and ran blindly.

The door had swung to again.  He clutched it open; in the dim weird light, he saw a dark figure stoop over the well; he heard something flung aside, which fell upon the snow with a thud; then the figure sprang upon the coping of the well.

He ran with all his speed, his face beaten by the wind and sleet.  But he was too late.  A sharp cry pierced the night.  As he reached the well, and hung over it, he heard, or thought he heard, a groan, a beating of the water—­then no more.

Isaac’s shouts for help attracted the notice of a neighbour who was sitting up with her daughter and a new-born child.  She roused her son-in-law and his boy, and through them a score of others, deep night though it was.

Watson was among the first of those who gathered round the well.  He and others lowered Isaac with ropes into its icy depths, and drew him up again, while the snow beat upon them all—­the straining men—­two dripping shapes emerging from the earth.  A murmur of horror greeted the first sight of that marred face on Isaac’s arm, as the lanterns fell upon it.  For there was a gash above the eye, caused by a projection in the hard chalk side of the well, which of itself spoke death.