I saw her raise her face, and look upon me for the first time for eighteen years.  She did not scream at sight of me, for the body of her son lay between us, and bridged the gulf that Adam Dishart had made.

I saw myself draw near her reverently and say, “Margaret, he is dead, and that is why I have come back,” and I saw her put her arms around my neck as she often did long ago.

But it was not to be.  Never since that night at Harvie have I spoken to Margaret.

The Egyptian and I were to come to Windyghoul before I heard her speak.  She was not addressing me.  Here Gavin and she had met first, and she was talking of that meeting to herself.

“It was there,” I heard her say softly, as she gazed at the bush beneath which she had seen him shaking his fist at her on the night of the riots.  A little farther on she stopped where a path from Windyghoul sets off for the well in the wood.  She looked up it wistfully, and there I left her behind, and pressed on to the mud-house to ask Nanny Webster if the minister was dead.  Nanny’s gate was swinging in the wind, but her door was shut, and for a moment I stood at it like a coward, afraid to enter and hear the worst.

The house was empty.  I turned from it relieved, as if I had got a respite, and while I stood in the garden the Egyptian came to me shuddering, her twitching face asking the question that would not leave her lips.

“There is no one in the house,” I said.  “Nanny is perhaps at the well.”

But the gypsy went inside, and pointing to the fire said, “It has been out for hours.  Do you not see?  The murder has drawn every one into Thrums.”

So I feared.  A dreadful night was to pass before I knew that this was the day of the release of Sanders Webster, and that frail Nanny had walked into Tilliedrum to meet him at the prison gate.

Babbie sank upon a stool, so weak that I doubt whether she heard me tell her to wait there until my return.  I hurried into Thrums, not by the hill, though it is the shorter way, but by the Roods, for I must hear all before I ventured to approach the manse.  From Windyghoul to the top of the Roods it is a climb and then a steep descent.  The road has no sooner reached its highest point than it begins to fall in the straight line of houses called the Roods, and thus I came upon a full view of the street at once.  A cart was laboring up it.  There were women sitting on stones at their doors, and girls playing at palaulays, and out of the house nearest me came a black figure.  My eyes failed me; I was asking so much from them.  They made him tall and short, and spare and stout, so that I knew it was Gavin, and yet, looking again, feared, but all the time, I think, I knew it was he.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

The hill before darkness fell—­scene of the impending catastrophe.