’Damned if you won’t poison yourself with these apothecary messes and witch mixtures some time or other,’ said her husband, when his eye chanced to fall upon the multitudinous array.

She did not reply, but turned her sad, soft glance upon him in such heart-swollen reproach that he looked sorry for his words, and added, ’I only meant it for your good, you know, Gertrude.’

‘I’ll clear out the whole lot, and destroy them,’ said she huskily, ’and try such remedies no more!’

‘You want somebody to cheer you,’ he observed.  ’I once thought of adopting a boy; but he is too old now.  And he is gone away I don’t know where.’

She guessed to whom he alluded; for Rhoda Brook’s story had in the course of years become known to her; though not a word had ever passed between her husband and herself on the subject.  Neither had she ever spoken to him of her visit to Conjuror Trendle, and of what was revealed to her, or she thought was revealed to her, by that solitary heath-man.

She was now five-and-twenty; but she seemed older.

‘Six years of marriage, and only a few months of love,’ she sometimes whispered to herself.  And then she thought of the apparent cause, and said, with a tragic glance at her withering limb, ’If I could only again be as I was when he first saw me!’

She obediently destroyed her nostrums and charms; but there remained a hankering wish to try something else—­some other sort of cure altogether.  She had never revisited Trendle since she had been conducted to the house of the solitary by Rhoda against her will; but it now suddenly occurred to Gertrude that she would, in a last desperate effort at deliverance from this seeming curse, again seek out the man, if he yet lived.  He was entitled to a certain credence, for the indistinct form he had raised in the glass had undoubtedly resembled the only woman in the world who—­as she now knew, though not then—­could have a reason for bearing her ill-will.  The visit should be paid.

This time she went alone, though she nearly got lost on the heath, and roamed a considerable distance out of her way.  Trendle’s house was reached at last, however:  he was not indoors, and instead of waiting at the cottage, she went to where his bent figure was pointed out to her at work a long way off.  Trendle remembered her, and laying down the handful of furze-roots which he was gathering and throwing into a heap, he offered to accompany her in her homeward direction, as the distance was considerable and the days were short.  So they walked together, his head bowed nearly to the earth, and his form of a colour with it.

‘You can send away warts and other excrescences I know,’ she said; ’why can’t you send away this?’ And the arm was uncovered.

‘You think too much of my powers!’ said Trendle; ’and I am old and weak now, too.  No, no; it is too much for me to attempt in my own person.  What have ye tried?’