But Mrs. Melrose was dying; and her little daughter, a more romantic figure than ever, in the public eye, was to find, it said, a second mother in Lady Tatham.

The rain clouds were swirling through the dale, as Boden reached its middle point, pushing his way against a cold westerly blast.  The stream, which in summer chatters so gently to the travellers beside it, was rushing in a brown swift flood, and drowning the low meadows on its western bank.  He mounted a stone foot-bridge to look at it, when, of a sudden, the curtain of cloud shrouding Blencathra was torn aside, and its high ridge, razor-sharp, appeared spectrally white, a seat of the storm-god, in a far heaven.  The livid lines of just-fallen snow, outlining the cliffs and ravines of the great mountain, stamped its majesty, visionlike, on the senses.  Below it, some scattered woods, inky black, bent under the storm, and the crash and darkness of the lower air threw into clear relief the pallid splendour of the mountain-top.

Boden stood enthralled, when a voice said at his elbow: 

“Yo’re oot on a clashy night, Muster Boden!”

He turned.  Beside him stood the fugitive!—­grinning weakly.  Boden beheld a tottering and ghastly figure.  Distress—­mortal fatigue—­breathed from the haggard emaciation of face and limbs.  Round the shoulders was folded a sack, from which the dregs of some red dipping mixture it had once contained had dripped over the youth’s chest and legs, his tattered clothes and broken boots, in streams of what, to Boden’s startled sense, looked like blood.  And under the slouched hat, a pair of sunken eyes looked out, expressing the very uttermost of human despair.

“Brand!—­where have you been?”

“Don’t touch me, sir!  I’ll go—­don’t touch me!  There ha’ been hunnerds after me—­latin me on t’ fells.  They’ve not catcht me—­an’ they’d not ha’ catcht me noo—­but I’m wore oot.  I ha’ been followin yo’ this half-hour, Muster Boden.  I could ha’ put yo’ i’ the river fasst enoof.”

A ghastly chuckle in the darkness.  Boden considered.

“Well, now—­are you going to give yourself up?  You see—­I can do nothing to force you!  But if you take my advice, you’ll go quietly with me, to the police—­you’ll make a clean breast of it.”

“Will they hang me, Muster Boden?”

“I don’t think so,” said Boden slowly.  “What made you do it?”

“I’d planned it for months—­I’ve follered owd Melrose many times—­I’ve been close oop to ‘im—­when he had noa noshun whativver.  I might ha’ killt him—­a doosen times over.  He wor a devil—­an’ I paid him oot!  I was creepin’ round t’ hoose that night—­and ov a suddent, there was a door openin’, an’ a light.  It seemed to be God sayin’, ’Theer’s a way, mon! go in, and do’t!  So I went in.  An’ I saw Muster Faversham coom oot—­an’ Dixon.  An’ I knew that he wor there—­alone—­the owd fox!—­an’ I waited—­an’ oot he came.  I shot ’un straight, Muster Boden!  I shot ’un straight!”