She dropped the sleeve, faced round, and eyed me.

“What do you know of that?” she asked slowly, and as if her chest tightened over the words.  She was a woman of fifty and more, of fine figure but a worn face.  Her chief surviving beauty was a pile of light golden hair, still lustrous as a girl’s.  But her blue eyes—­though now they narrowed on me suspiciously—­must have looked out magnificently in their day.

“I fancy,” said I, meeting them frankly enough, “that what you know and I don’t on that matter would make a good deal.”

She laughed harshly, almost savagely.

“You’d better ask Sarah Gedye, across the coombe.  She buried a man’s clothes one time, and—­it might be worth your while to ask her what came o’t.”

If you can imagine a glint of moonlight running up the blade of a rapier, you may know the chill flame of spite and despite that flickered in her eyes then as she spoke.

“I take my oath,” I muttered to myself, “I’ll act on the invitation.”

The woman stood straight upright, with her hands clasped behind her, before the deal table.  She gazed, under lowered brows, straight out of window; and following that gaze, I saw across the coombe a mean mud hut, with a wall around it, that looked on Sheba Farm with the obtrusive humility of a poor relation.

“Does she—­does Sarah Gedye—­live down yonder?”

“What is that to you?” she enquired fiercely, and then was silent for a moment, and added, with another short laugh—­

“I reckon I’d like the question put to her:  but I doubt you’ve got the pluck.”

“You shall see,” said I; and taking my coat off the towel-horse, I slipped it on.

She did not turn, did not even move her head, when I thanked her for the shelter and walked out of the house.

I could feel those steel-blue eyes working like gimlets into my back as I strode down the hill and passed the wooden plank that lay across the stream at its foot.  A climb of less than a minute brought me to the green gate in the wall of Sarah Gedye’s garden patch; and here I took a look backwards and upwards at Sheba.  The sun lay warm on its white walls, and the whole building shone against the burnt hillside.  It was too far away for me to spy Mrs. Bolverson’s blue print gown within the kitchen window, but I knew that she stood there yet.

The sound of a footstep made me turn.  A woman was coming round the corner of the cottage, with a bundle of mint in her hand.

She looked at me, shook off a bee that had blundered against her apron, and looked at me again—­a brown woman, lean and strongly made, with jet-black eyes set deep and glistening in an ugly face.

“You want to know your way?” she asked.

“No.  I came to see you, if your name is Sarah Gedye.”

“Sarah Ann Gedye is my name.  What ’st want?”

I took a sudden resolution to tell the exact truth.