remembered there was a hovel of furze near a sheepfold.  If she could get into that hovel, she would be warmer.  She could pass the night there, for that was what Alick did at Hayslope in lambing-time.  The thought of this hovel brought the energy of a new hope.  She took up her basket and walked across the field, but it was some time before she got in the right direction for the stile.  The exercise and the occupation of finding the stile were a stimulus to her, however, and lightened the horror of the darkness and solitude.  There were sheep in the next field, and she startled a group as she set down her basket and got over the stile; and the sound of their movement comforted her, for it assured her that her impression was right—­this was the field where she had seen the hovel, for it was the field where the sheep were.  Right on along the path, and she would get to it.  She reached the opposite gate, and felt her way along its rails and the rails of the sheep-fold, till her hand encountered the pricking of the gorsy wall.  Delicious sensation!  She had found the shelter.  She groped her way, touching the prickly gorse, to the door, and pushed it open.  It was an ill-smelling close place, but warm, and there was straw on the ground.  Hetty sank down on the straw with a sense of escape.  Tears came—­she had never shed tears before since she left Windsor—­tears and sobs of hysterical joy that she had still hold of life, that she was still on the familiar earth, with the sheep near her.  The very consciousness of her own limbs was a delight to her:  she turned up her sleeves, and kissed her arms with the passionate love of life.  Soon warmth and weariness lulled her in the midst of her sobs, and she fell continually into dozing, fancying herself at the brink of the pool again—­fancying that she had jumped into the water, and then awaking with a start, and wondering where she was.  But at last deep dreamless sleep came; her head, guarded by her bonnet, found a pillow against the gorsy wall, and the poor soul, driven to and fro between two equal terrors, found the one relief that was possible to it—­the relief of unconsciousness.

Alas!  That relief seems to end the moment it has begun.  It seemed to Hetty as if those dozen dreams had only passed into another dream—­that she was in the hovel, and her aunt was standing over her with a candle in her hand.  She trembled under her aunt’s glance, and opened her eyes.  There was no candle, but there was light in the hovel—­the light of early morning through the open door.  And there was a face looking down on her; but it was an unknown face, belonging to an elderly man in a smock-frock.

“Why, what do you do here, young woman?” the man said roughly.

Hetty trembled still worse under this real fear and shame than she had done in her momentary dream under her aunt’s glance.  She felt that she was like a beggar already—­found sleeping in that place.  But in spite of her trembling, she was so eager to account to the man for her presence here, that she found words at once.