“I think they said she’d wedded a waistrel on the Borders.”

“Did they ever say the man was dead?”

“No, I can’t mind that they ever did.  I can’t mind it.  He had beaten her and soured her into the witch that she is now, and then she had run away frae him with her little one, Joe that now is.  That was what they said, as I mind it.”

“Two and two are easily put together, Sim.  Wilson Garth, not James Wilson, was the man’s name.”

“And he was Mrs. Garth’s husband and the father of Joe?”

“The same, I think.”

Sim seemed to stagger under the shock of a discovery that had been slow to dawn upon him.

“How did it come, Ralph, that you brought him here when you came home from the wars?  Everything seems, someways, to hang on that.”

“Everything; perhaps even this last disaster of all.”  Ralph passed his fingers through his hair, and then his palm across his brow.  Sim observed a change in his friend’s manner.

“It was wrong of me to say that, it was,” he said.  “I don’t know that it’s true, either.  But tell me how it came about.”

“It’s a short story, old friend, and easily told, though it has never been told till now.  I had done the man some service at Carlisle.”

“Saved his life, so they say.”

“It was a good turn, truly, but I had done it—­at least, the first part of it—­unawares.  But that’s not a short story.”

“Tell me, Ralph.”

“It’s dead and done with, like the man himself.  What remains is not dead, and cannot soon be done with.  Some of us must meet it face to face even yet.  Wilson—­that was his name in those days—­was a Royalist when I encountered him.  What he had been before, God knows.  At a moment of peril he took his life at the hands of a Roundhead.  He had been guilty of treachery to the Royalists, and he was afraid to return to his friends.  I understood his position and sheltered him.  When Carlisle fell to us he clung closer to me, and when the campaign was over he prayed to be permitted to follow me to these parts.  I yielded to him reluctantly.  I distrusted him, but I took his anxiety to be with me for gratitude, as he said it was.  It was not that, Sim.”

“Was it fear?  Was he afeart of being hanged by friends or foes?  Hadn’t he been a taistrel to both?”

“Partly fear, but partly greed, and partly revenge.  He was hardly a week at Shoulthwaite before I guessed his secret—­I couldn’t be blind to that.  When he married his young wife on the Borders, folks didn’t use to call her a witch.  She had a little fortune coming to her one day, and when she fled the prospect of it was lost to her husband.  Wilson was in no hurry to recover her while she was poor-a vagrant woman with his child at her breast.  The sense of his rights as a husband became keener a little later.  Do you remember the time when young Joe Garth set himself up in the smithy yonder?”