“But he promised!  He promised!”

John Ford went towards her.

“Don’t touch me, grandfather!  I hate every one!  Let him do what he likes, I don’t care.”

John Ford’s face turned quite grey.

“Pasiance,” he said, “did you want to leave me so much?”

She looked straight at us, and said sharply: 

“What’s the good of telling stories.  I can’t help its hurting you.”

“What did you think you would find away from here?”

She laughed.

“Find?  I don’t know—­nothing; I wouldn’t be stifled anyway.  Now I suppose you’ll shut me up because I’m a weak girl, not strong like men!”

“Silence!” said John Ford; “I will make him take you.”

“You shan’t!” she cried; “I won’t let you.  He’s free to do as he likes.  He’s free—­I tell you all, everybody—­free!”

She ran through the window, and vanished.

John Ford made a movement as if the bottom had dropped out of his world. 
I left him there.

I went to the kitchen, where Hopgood was sitting at the table, eating bread and cheese.  He got up on seeing me, and very kindly brought me some cold bacon and a pint of ale.

“I thart I shude be seeing yu, zurr,” he said between his bites; “Therr’s no thart to ‘atin’ ’bout the ‘ouse to-day.  The old wumman’s puzzivantin’ over Miss Pasiance.  Young girls are skeery critters”—­he brushed his sleeve over his broad, hard jaws, and filled a pipe “specially when it’s in the blood of ’em.  Squire Rick Voisey werr a dandy; an’ Mistress Voisey—­well, she werr a nice lady tu, but”—­rolling the stem of his pipe from corner to corner of his mouth—­“she werr a pra-aper vixen.”

Hopgood’s a good fellow, and I believe as soft as he looks hard, but he’s not quite the sort with whom one chooses to talk over a matter like this.  I went upstairs, and began to pack, but after a bit dropped it for a book, and somehow or other fell asleep.

I woke, and looked at my watch; it was five o’clock.  I had been asleep four hours.  A single sunbeam was slanting across from one of my windows to the other, and there was the cool sound of milk dropping into pails; then, all at once, a stir as of alarm, and heavy footsteps.

I opened my door.  Hopgood and a coast-guardsman were carrying Pasiance slowly up the stairs.  She lay in their arms without moving, her face whiter than her dress, a scratch across the forehead, and two or three drops there of dried blood.  Her hands were clasped, and she slowly crooked and stiffened out her fingers.  When they turned with her at the stair top, she opened her lips, and gasped, “All right, don’t put me down.  I can bear it.”  They passed, and, with a half-smile in her eyes, she said something to me that I couldn’t catch; the door was shut, and the excited whispering began again below.  I waited for the men to come out, and caught hold of Hopgood.  He wiped the sweat off his forehead.