“Oh, maister!” ejaculated one of them, “havn’t ’ee heard?”

“Heard what?  I come in and find my poor dog—­” He broke off; he could not bring himself to utter the words that would tell what he had come upon.

“Missus got out of the bed and found someone had hung the dog, and her was took all of a sudden, and the doctor is overstairs weth her now,” the girl informed him; and through all her commiseration the ghoulish delight of her kind in misfortune showed.  “She’m mortal bad, they do say,” she added.

Ishmael stood still where he was.  His mind had been subjected to too violent an onslaught for this fresh news to break upon it with much added weight.  Dimly aware that the standard of these other people would expect him hardly to notice the death of his dog when his wife was in danger, he did not speak again of Wanda, but all his loyalty of affection went out to the furry body lying helplessly in the deserted parlour, as all his sense of horror had been absorbed by the finding of it.  After that everything seemed to him more or less dreamlike; an impersonal pity and anxiety he felt and deeply, but it was as though he stood and looked on at Phoebe from outside of himself as much as from outside of her.

He was first stirred to active realisation by the expression of her physical pain; when he heard her cries, rising and falling, piercing the calm autumn night, he went into the garden and tried to stop his ears, but the thin poignancy of those cries still rang in them.  He went back to the parlour, and picking up the body of poor Wanda, carried it out to a spot of the garden where the sun fell the longest, and there, beneath a rambler rose bush, began to dig her grave furiously.  Suddenly it struck him as rather awful that it should be a grave he was busy over at such a moment, and he stopped.  Then his deadly sense of proportion that never would leave him alone for long told him how little it really mattered, and he went on with his work.  Wanda was covered by a smoothed patch of earth—­he wanted no mound to bring the memory of the pity of her before him—­by the time the flame in his lantern had flickered and died, and the late moon was riding high in the sky.  He put on his coat and went again to the house.

Phoebe’s ordeal was not over till broad day had appeared and the usual sounds of farm-life had perforce begun again.  With them there mingled a fresh note—­the cry of the new-born child, insistent, wailing, plaintive; but the cries of its mother had ceased.  She lay silent in her exhaustion, amid the dim looming of the horror that had encompassed her, and she showed no interest even in the desired babe that had been laid in the curve of her arm as she had pictured him not twelve hours before.