‘How did it happen?’ she said mechanically.

‘I cannot tell,’ replied Mrs. Lodge, shaking her head.  ’One night when I was sound asleep, dreaming I was away in some strange place, a pain suddenly shot into my arm there, and was so keen as to awaken me.  I must have struck it in the daytime, I suppose, though I don’t remember doing so.’  She added, laughing, ’I tell my dear husband that it looks just as if he had flown into a rage and struck me there.  O, I daresay it will soon disappear.’

‘Ha, ha!  Yes . . .  On what night did it come?’

Mrs. Lodge considered, and said it would be a fortnight ago on the morrow.  ‘When I awoke I could not remember where I was,’ she added, ‘till the clock striking two reminded me.’

She had named the night and the hour of Rhoda’s spectral encounter, and Brook felt like a guilty thing.  The artless disclosure startled her; she did not reason on the freaks of coincidence; and all the scenery of that ghastly night returned with double vividness to her mind.

‘O, can it be,’ she said to herself, when her visitor had departed, ’that I exercise a malignant power over people against my own will?’ She knew that she had been slily called a witch since her fall; but never having understood why that particular stigma had been attached to her, it had passed disregarded.  Could this be the explanation, and had such things as this ever happened before?

CHAPTER IV—­A SUGGESTION

The summer drew on, and Rhoda Brook almost dreaded to meet Mrs. Lodge again, notwithstanding that her feeling for the young wife amounted well-nigh to affection.  Something in her own individuality seemed to convict Rhoda of crime.  Yet a fatality sometimes would direct the steps of the latter to the outskirts of Holmstoke whenever she left her house for any other purpose than her daily work; and hence it happened that their next encounter was out of doors.  Rhoda could not avoid the subject which had so mystified her, and after the first few words she stammered, ’I hope your—­arm is well again, ma’am?’ She had perceived with consternation that Gertrude Lodge carried her left arm stiffly.

’No; it is not quite well.  Indeed it is no better at all; it is rather worse.  It pains me dreadfully sometimes.’

‘Perhaps you had better go to a doctor, ma’am.’

She replied that she had already seen a doctor.  Her husband had insisted upon her going to one.  But the surgeon had not seemed to understand the afflicted limb at all; he had told her to bathe it in hot water, and she had bathed it, but the treatment had done no good.

‘Will you let me see it?’ said the milkwoman.

Mrs. Lodge pushed up her sleeve and disclosed the place, which was a few inches above the wrist.  As soon as Rhoda Brook saw it, she could hardly preserve her composure.  There was nothing of the nature of a wound, but the arm at that point had a shrivelled look, and the outline of the four fingers appeared more distinct than at the former time.  Moreover, she fancied that they were imprinted in precisely the relative position of her clutch upon the arm in the trance; the first finger towards Gertrude’s wrist, and the fourth towards her elbow.