more than twisting her attenuated neck, the whole village street from the Cromartins’ gate to the spire of the village church, as well as everything that passed up and down the shadow-flecked road:  which child, for instance, was late for school, and how often, and what it wore and whether its clothes were new or inherited from an elder sister; who came to the Bronsons’ next door, and how long they stayed, and whether they brought anything with them or carried anything away; the peddler with his pack; the gunner on his way to the marshes, his two dogs following at his heels in a leash; Dr. John Cavendish’s gig, and whether it was about to stop at Uncle Ephraim Tipple’s or keep on, as usual, and whirl into the open gate of Cobden Manor; Billy Tatham’s passenger list, as the ricketty stage passed with the side curtains up, and the number of trunks and bags, and the size of them, all indicative of where they were bound and for how long; details of village life—­no one of which concerned her in the least—­being matters of profound interest to Miss Gossaway.

These several discoveries she shared daily with a faded old mother who sat huddled up in a rocking-chair by the stove, winter and summer, whether it had any fire in it or not.

Uncle Ephraim Tipple, in his outspoken way, always referred to these two gossips as the “spiders.”  “When the thin one has sucked the life out of you,” he would say with a laugh, “she passes you on to her old mother, who sits doubled up inside the web, and when she gets done munching there isn’t anything left but your hide and bones.”

It was but one of Uncle Ephraim’s jokes.  The mother was only a forlorn, half-alive old woman who dozed in her chair by the hour—­the relict of a fisherman who had gone to sea in his yawl some twenty years before and who had never come back.  The daughter, with the courage of youth, had then stepped into the gap and had alone made the fight for bread.  Gradually, as the years went by the roses in her cheeks—­never too fresh at any time—­had begun to fade, her face and figure to shrink, and her brow to tighten.  At last, embitterred by her responsibilities and disappointments, she had lost faith in human kind and had become a shrew.  Since then her tongue had swept on as relentlessly as a scythe, sparing neither flower nor noxious weed, a movement which it was wise, sometimes, to check.

When, therefore, Martha, with Meg now bounding before her, caught sight of Ann Gossaway’s beckoning hand thrust out of the low window of her cottage —­the spider-web referred to by Uncle Ephraim—­she halted in her walk, lingered a moment as if undecided, expressed her opinion of the dressmaker to Meg in an undertone, and swinging open the gate with its ball and chain, made her way over the grass-plot and stood outside the window, level with the sill.

“Well, it ain’t none of my business, of course, Martha Sands,” Miss Gossaway began, “and that’s just what I said to mother when I come home, but if I was some folks I’d see my company in my parlor, long as I had one, ‘stead of hidin’ down behind the House o’ Refuge.  I said to mother soon’s I got in, ‘I’m goin’ to tell Martha Sands fust minute I see her.  She ain’t got no idee how them girls of hers is carryin’ on or she’d stop it.’  That’s what I said, didn’t I, mother?”