There was a little clear stream near, and he went and brought her water, making her drink it and bathe the dust-stains from her face and hands, and the gentle authority with which he made her do these simple things seemed somehow to somewhat calm her madness.  She looked up at him staring, and with long, sobbing breaths.

“Who—­are you?” she asked, helplessly.

“I am the Marquess of Roxholm,” he answered, “and I ride to my father’s house at Camylott; but I cannot leave you until I know you are safe.”

“Safe!” she said.  “I safe!” and she clasped her hands about her knees as she sat, wringing her fingers together.  “You do not ask me who I am,” she added.

“I need not know your name to do you service,” he answered.  “But I must ask you where you would go—­to rest.”

“To Death—­from which you have plucked me!” was her reply, and she dropped her head against her held-up knees and broke forth sobbing again.  “I tell you there is naught else.  If your horse had beat my face into the dust, none would have known where I lay at last.  Five days have I walked and my very clothes I changed with a gipsy woman.  None would have known.”  Suddenly she looked up with shame and terror in her eyes, the blood flaming in her face.  She involuntarily clutched at his sleeve as if in her horror she must confide even to this stranger.  “They had begun to look at me—­and whisper,” she said.  “And one day a girl who hated me laughed outright as I passed—­though I strove to bear myself so straightly—­and I heard her mock me.  ‘Pride cometh first,’ she said, ‘and then the fall. She hath fallen far.’”

She looked so young and piteous that Roxholm felt a mist pass before his eyes.

“Poor child!” he said; “poor child!”

“I was proud,” she cried.  “It was my sin.  They taunted me that he was a gentleman and meant me ill, and it angered me—­poor fool—­and I held my head higher.  He told me he had writ for his Chaplain to come and wed us in secret.  He called me ‘my lady’ and told me what his pride in me would be when we went to the town.”  She put her hands up to her working throat as if somewhat strangled her, and the awful look came back into her widened eyes.  “In but a little while he went away,” she gasped—­“and when he came back, and I went to meet him in the dark and fell weeping upon his breast, he pushed me back and looked at me, and curled his lip laughing, and turned away!  Oh, John!—­John Oxon!” she cried out, “God laughs at women—­why shouldst not thou?” and her paroxysm began again.

At high noon a wagoner whose cart was loaded with hay drove into the rick yard of a decent farm-house some hours’ journey from the turn in the road where my lord Marquess had been so strangely checked in his gallop.  An elderly gentleman in Chaplain’s garb and bands rode by the rough conveyance, and on a bed made in the hay a woman lay and groaned in mortal anguish.

The good woman of the house this reverend gentleman saw alone and had discourse with, paying her certain moneys for the trouble she would be put to by the charge he commanded to her, himself accompanying her when she went out to the wagon to care for its wretched burden.