Mrs. Hurd went on in a torrent of half-finished sentences and fragments of remembered talk.  She told her husband’s story of the encounter with the keepers as he had told it to her, of course with additions and modifications already struck out by the agony of inventive pain; she described how she had made him take his blood-stained clothes and hide them in a hole in the roof; then how she had urged him to strike across country at once and get a few hours start before the ghastly business was known.  But the more he talked to her the more confident he became of his own story, and the more determined to stay and brave it out.  Besides, he was shrewd enough to see that escape for a man of his deformity was impossible, and he tried to make her understand it so.  But she was mad and blind with fear, and at last, just as the light was coming in, he told her roughly, to end their long wrestle, that he should go to bed and get some sleep.  She would make a fool of him, and he should want all his wits.  She followed him up the steep ladder to their room, weeping.  And there was little Willie sitting up in bed, choking with the phlegm in his throat, and half dead of fright because of the voices below.

“And when Hurd see him, he went and cuddled him up, and rubbed his legs and feet to warm them, an’ I could hear him groanin’.  And I says to him, ‘Jim, if you won’t go for my sake, will you go for the boy’s?’ For you see, miss, there was a bit of money in the house, an’ I thought he’d hide himself by day and walk by night, and so get to Liverpool perhaps, and off to the States.  An’ it seemed as though my head would burst with listening for people comin’, and him taken up there like a rat in a trap, an’ no way of provin’ the truth, and everybody agen him, because of the things he’d said.  And he burst out a-cryin’, an’ Willie cried.  An’ I came an’ entreated of him.  An’ he kissed me; an’ at last he said he’d go.  An’ I made haste, the light was getting so terrible strong; an’ just as he’d got to the foot of the stairs, an’ I was holding little Willie in my arms an’ saying good-bye to him—­”

She let her head sink against the settle.  There was no more to say, and Marcella asked no more questions—­she sat thinking.  Willie stood, a wasted, worn figure, by his mother, stroking her face; his hoarse breathing was for the time the only sound in the cottage.

Then Marcella heard a loud knock at the door.  She got up and looked through the casement window.  The crowd had mostly dispersed, but a few people stood about on the green, and a policeman was stationed outside the cottage.  On the steps stood Aldous Raeburn, his horse held behind him by a boy.

She went and opened the door.

“I will come,” she said at once.  “There—­I see Mrs. Mullins crossing the common.  Now I can leave her.”

Aldous, taking off his hat, closed the door behind him and stood with his hand on Marcella’s arm, looking at the huddled woman on the settle, at the pale children.  There was a solemnity in his expression, a mixture of judgment and pity which showed that the emotion of other scenes also—­scenes through which he had just passed—­was entering into it.