“Of course I’ll row you to The Mills, if it’s to jail you want to go; but Walker is pretty bad, they say.  I think it’ll be murder they’ll bring you up for; and it ain’t no sort of use trying to prove that you didn’t do it!”

The miserable man put his dirty knotted hands before his face and howled again.  But even that involuntary sound was furtive lest any one should hear.  He might have shrieked and roared with all the strength that was in him—­there was no human ear within reach—­but the instinct of cowardice kept him from making any more noise than was necessary to rend and break the heart of the woman beside him,—­that, although he was only half conscious of it, was his purpose in crying.  He had a fiendish desire to make her suffer for bringing him such news.

Ann was not given to feeling for others, yet now it was intense suffering to her to see him shaking, writhing, moving like a beast in pain.  She did not think of it as her suffering; she transferred it all to him, and supposed that it was the realisation of his misery that she experienced.

At last she said:  “There’s one fellow up to the falls that knows a track through the north of the marsh to sound ground; I heard him tell it one day how he’d found it out.  It’s that David Brown that’s been coming round to see Christa.  Christa can get the chart he made from him by to-morrow night—­I know she can.  I’ll try to be here earlier than I was to-night.  And I brought you strips of stuff, father, so that you could tie yourself on to the tree and have a sort of a sleep; and I brought a few drops of morphia, just enough to make you feel sleepy and stupid, and make the time pass a bit quicker.”

For a long while he writhed and cried, telling her that it took all the wits that he had to keep awake enough to keep the devils off him without taking stuff to make him sleep, and that he was sure she’d never come back, and that he would very likely be left on the tree to rot or to fall into the water.

All that he said came so near to being true that it caused her the utmost pain to hear it.  He was clever enough by instinct, not by thought, to know that mere idle cries could not torture her as did the true picture of the fears and dangers that encompassed him in his wild hiding-place.  The endurance of this torture exhausted her as nothing had ever exhausted her before; yet all the time she never doubted but that the pain was his, and that she was merely a spectator.

She soothed him at last, not by gentleness and caresses—­no such communication ever passed between them—­but by plain, practical, hopeful suggestions spoken out clearly in the intervals of his whining.  At length she esteemed it time to use the spur instead of stroking him any longer.  “Get up on the tree, father, and I will give you the rest of the things when you are fixed on the branch.  If Toyner’s stirring again before I get home, he’ll find means to keep me from coming to-morrow night.  Climb up