“Yes, we.  It ain’t a bad game being mistress o’ this house.  Eh, Cousin ’Lizabeth?”

She turned her hot face to the flame, without reply; and he went on his way up the stairs.

’Lizabeth sat for a while staring into the wood embers with shaded eyes.  Whatever the path by which her reflections travelled, it led in the end to the kettle.  She remembered that the tea was still to make, and, on stooping to set the kettle back upon the logs, found it emptied by William’s potations.  Donning her stout shoes and pattens, and slipping a shawl over her head, she reached down the lantern from its peg, lit it, and went out to fill the kettle at the spring.

It was pitch-dark; the rain was still falling, and as she crossed the yard the sodden straw squeaked beneath her tread.  The yard had been fashioned generations since, by levelling back from the house to the natural rock of the hill-side, and connecting the two on the right by cow-house and stable, with an upper storey for barn and granary, on the left by a low wall, where, through a rough gate, the cart-track from the valley found its entrance.  Against the further end of this wall leant an open cart-shed; and within three paces of it a perpetual spring of water gushing down the rock was caught and arrested for a while in a stone trough before it hurried out by a side gutter, and so down to join the trout-stream in the valley below.  The spring first came to light half-way down the rock’s face.  Overhead its point of emergence was curtained by a network of roots pushed out by the trees above and sprawling over the lip in helpless search for soil.

’Lizabeth’s lantern threw a flare of yellow on these and on the bubbling water as she filled her kettle.  She was turning to go when a sound arrested her.

It was the sound of a suppressed sob, and seemed to issue from the cart-shed.  ’Lizabeth turned quickly and held up her lantern.  Under the shed, and barely four paces from her, sat a woman.

The woman was perched against the shaft of a hay-waggon, with her feet resting on a mud-soiled carpet-bag.  She made but a poor appealing figure, tricked out in odds and ends of incongruous finery, with a bonnet, once smart, hanging limply forward over a pair of light-coloured eyes and a very lachrymose face.  The ambition of the stranger’s toilet, which ran riot in cheap jewellery, formed so odd a contrast with her sorry posture that ’Lizabeth, for all her wonder, felt inclined to smile.

“What’s your business here?”

“Oh, tell me,” whimpered the woman, “what’s he doing all this time?  Won’t his father see me?  He don’t intend to leave me here all night, surely, in this bitter cold, with nothing to eat, and my gown ruined!”

“He?” ’Lizabeth’s attitude stiffened with suspicion of the truth.

“William, I mean; an’ a sorry day it was I agreed to come.”

“William?”

“My husband.  I’m Mrs. William Transom.”