With that I was in my saddle and rode away, for I had lingered, I feared, too long, and as God is my witness I had no faith that Catherine Cavendish did more than assume such interest in me for her own ends, for love, as I conceived it, was not thus.

I hastened on my way to Barry Upper Branch, where was the rendezvous, and on my way had to pass the house where dwelt that woman of strange repute, Margery Key, and it was naught but a solidity of shadow beside the road except for a glimmer of white from the breast of her cat in the doorway.  But as I live, as I rode past, a voice came from that house, though how she knew me in that gloom I know not.

“Good speed to thee, Master Wingfield, and the fagots that thou didst gather for the despised and poor shall turn into blessings, like bars of silver.  That which thou hast given, hast thou forever.  Go on and fear not, and strike for liberty, and no harm shall come nigh thee.”  As she spoke I saw the bent back of the poor old crone in the doorway beside her cat, and partly because of her blessing, and partly because, as I said before, whether witch or not, she was aged and feeble, and ill fitted for such work, I leapt from my saddle and gathered her another armful of fagots, and laid them on her hearth.  I left the old soul shedding such tears of gratitude over that slight service and calling down such childish blessings upon my head that I began to have little doubt that she was no witch, but only a poor and solitary old woman, which to my mind is the forlornest state of humanity.  How a man fares without those of his own flesh and blood I can understand, since a man must needs have some comfort in his own endurance of hardships, but what a woman can do without chick or child, and no solace in her own dependency, I know not.  Verily I know not that such be to blame if they turn to Satan himself for a protector, as they suspected Margery Key of doing.

I rode away from Margery Key’s, having been delayed but a moment, and the quaver of her blessings was yet in my ears, when verily I did see that which I have never understood.  As I live, there passed from the house of that ne’er-do-well next door, which was closed tightly as if to assure folk that all therein were sound asleep, a bright light like a torch, but no man carried it, and it crossed the road and was away over the meadows, and no man whom I saw carried it, and it waved in the wind like a torch streaming back, and I knew it for a corpse candle.  And that same night the man who dwelt in that house was slain while pulling up the tobacco plants.

I rode fast, marvelling a little upon this strange sight, yet, though marvelling, not afraid, for things that I understand not, and that seem to savour of something outside the flesh, have always rather aroused me to rage as of one who was approached by other than the given rules of warfare rather than fear.  I have always argued that an apparition should attack only his own kind, and hath no right to leave his own battlefield for ours, when we be at a disadvantage by our lack of understanding as to weapons.  So if I had time I would have ridden after that corpse candle and gotten, if I could, a sight of the bearer had he been fiend or spook, but I knew that I had none to lose.  So I rode on hard to Barry Upper Branch.