“Here’s oor wee Gracie,” she said:  “Ann, help me hame wi’ her!”

So they brought her home, and laid her all in dripping white upon her white bed.  Barbara sat at the bed-head and crooned, having lost her wits.  Aunt Annie moved all in a piece, as though she were about to fall headlong.

“White floo’ers for the angels, where Gracie’s ga’en to!  Annie, woman, dinna ye see them by her body—­four great angels, at ilka corner yin?”

Barbara’s voice rose and fell, wayward and querulous.  There was no other sound in the house, only the water sobbing against the edge of the ferry-boat.

“And the first is like a lion,” she went on, in a more even recitative, “and the second is like an ox, and the third has a face like a man, and the fourth is like a flying eagle.  An’ they’re sittin’ on ilka bedpost; and they hae sax wings, that meet owre my Gracie, an’ they cry withoot ceasing, ’Holy! holy! holy!  Woe unto him that causeth one of these little ones to perish!  It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the deeps o’ the Black Water!’”

But the neighbours paid no attention to her—­for, of course, she was mad.

Then the wise folk came and explained how it had all happened.  Here she had been gathering flowers; here she had slipped; and here, again, she had fallen.  Nothing could be clearer.  There were the flowers.  There was the dangerous pool on the Black Water.  And there was the body of Grace Allen, a young thing dead in the flower of her days.

“I see them!  I see them!” cried Barbara, fixing her eyes on the bed, her voice like a shriek; “they are full of eyes, behind and before, and they see into the heart of man.  Their faces are full of anger, and their mouths are open to devour—­”

“Wheesh, wheesh, woman!  Here’s the young Sheriff come doon frae the Barr wi’ the Fiscal to tak’ evidence.”

And Barbara Allen was silent as Gregory Jeffray came in.

To do him justice, when he wrote her the letter that killed—­concerning the necessities of his position and career—­he had tried to break the parting gently.  How should he know all that she knew?  It was clearly an ill turn that fate had played him.  Indeed, he felt ill-used.  So he listened to the Fiscal taking evidence, and in due course departed.

But within an inner pocket he had a letter that was not filed with the documents, but which might have shed clearer light upon when and how Grace Allen slipped and fell, gathering flowers at night above the great pool of the Black Water.

“There is set up a throne in the heavens,” chanted mad Barbara Allen as Gregory went out; “and One sits upon it—­and my Gracie’s there, clothed in white robes, an’ a palm in her hand.  And you’ll be there, young man,” she cried after him, “and I’ll be there.  There’s a cry comin’ owre the Black Water for you, like the cry that raised me oot o’ my bed yestreen.  An’ ye’ll hear it—­ye’ll hear it, braw young man; ay—­and rise up and answer, too!”