“I lost my way,” she said.  “I’m travelling—­north’ard, and I got away from the road into the fields, and was overtaken by the dark.  Will you tell me the way to the nearest village?”

She got up as she was speaking, and put her hands to her bonnet to adjust it, and then laid hold of her basket.

The man looked at her with a slow bovine gaze, without giving her any answer, for some seconds.  Then he turned away and walked towards the door of the hovel, but it was not till he got there that he stood still, and, turning his shoulder half-round towards her, said, “Aw, I can show you the way to Norton, if you like.  But what do you do gettin’ out o’ the highroad?” he added, with a tone of gruff reproof.  “Y’ull be gettin’ into mischief, if you dooant mind.”

“Yes,” said Hetty, “I won’t do it again.  I’ll keep in the road, if you’ll be so good as show me how to get to it.”

“Why dooant you keep where there’s a finger-poasses an’ folks to ax the way on?” the man said, still more gruffly.  “Anybody ’ud think you was a wild woman, an’ look at yer.”

Hetty was frightened at this gruff old man, and still more at this last suggestion that she looked like a wild woman.  As she followed him out of the hovel she thought she would give him a sixpence for telling her the way, and then he would not suppose she was wild.  As he stopped to point out the road to her, she put her hand in her pocket to get the six-pence ready, and when he was turning away, without saying good-morning, she held it out to him and said, “Thank you; will you please to take something for your trouble?”

He looked slowly at the sixpence, and then said, “I want none o’ your money.  You’d better take care on’t, else you’ll get it stool from yer, if you go trapesin’ about the fields like a mad woman a-thatway.”

The man left her without further speech, and Hetty held on her way.  Another day had risen, and she must wander on.  It was no use to think of drowning herself—­she could not do it, at least while she had money left to buy food and strength to journey on.  But the incident on her waking this morning heightened her dread of that time when her money would be all gone; she would have to sell her basket and clothes then, and she would really look like a beggar or a wild woman, as the man had said.  The passionate joy in life she had felt in the night, after escaping from the brink of the black cold death in the pool, was gone now.  Life now, by the morning light, with the impression of that man’s hard wondering look at her, was as full of dread as death—­it was worse; it was a dread to which she felt chained, from which she shrank and shrank as she did from the black pool, and yet could find no refuge from it.