On the trunk of one of these I sat down to rest, Mary Quince meanwhile pattering about in unmeaning explorations.  While thus listlessly seated, the girl Meg Hawkes, walked by, carrying a basket.

‘Hish!’ she said quickly, as she passed, without altering a pace or raising her eyes; ’don’t ye speak nor look—­fayther spies us; I’ll tell ye next turn.’

’Next turn’—­when was that?  Well, she might be returning; and as she could not then say more than she had said, in merely passing without a pause, I concluded to wait for a short time and see what would come of it.

After a short time I looked about me a little, and I saw Dickon Hawkes—­Pegtop, as poor Milly used to call him—­with an axe in his hand, prowling luridly among the timber.

Observing that I saw him, he touched his hat sulkily, and by-and-by passed me, muttering to himself.  He plainly could not understand what business I could have in that particular part of the Windmill Wood, and let me see it in his countenance.

His daughter did pass me again; but this time he was near, and she was silent.  Her next transit occurred as he was questioning Mary Quince at some little distance; and as she passed precisely in the same way, she said—­

‘Don’t you be alone wi’ Master Dudley nowhere for the world’s worth.’

The injunction was so startling that I was on the point of questioning the girl.  But I recollected myself, and waited in the hope that in her future transits she might be more explicit.  But one word more she did not utter, and the jealous eye of old Pegtop was so constantly upon us that I refrained.

There was vagueness and suggestion enough in the oracle to supply work for many an hour of anxious conjecture, and many a horrible vigil by night.  Was I never to know peace at Bartram-Haugh?

Ten days of poor Milly’s absence, and of my solitude, had already passed, when my uncle sent for me to his room.

When old Wyat stood at the door, mumbling and snarling her message, my heart died within me.

It was late—­just that hour when dejected people feel their anxieties most—­when the cold grey of twilight has deepened to its darkest shade, and before the cheerful candles are lighted, and the safe quiet of the night sets in.

When I entered my uncle’s sitting-room—­though his window-shutters were open and the wan streaks of sunset visible through them, like narrow lakes in the chasms of the dark western clouds—­a pair of candles were burning; one stood upon the table by his desk, the other on the chimneypiece, before which his tall, thin figure stooped.  His hand leaned on the mantelpiece, and the light from the candle just above his bowed head touched his silvery hair.  He was looking, as it seemed, into the subsiding embers of the fire, and was a very statue of forsaken dejection and decay.

‘Uncle!’ I ventured to say, having stood for some time unperceived near his table.