“Now hear me out, child!” he said—­“Let me speak on without interruption, or I shall never get through the tale.  Perhaps I ought to have told you before, but I’ve put it off and put it off, thinking ’twould be time enough when you and Robin were wed.  You and Robin—­you and Robin!—­your marriage bells have rung through my brain many and many a night for the past two years and never a bit nearer are you to the end of your wooing, such fanciful children as you both are!  And you’re so long about it and I’ve so short a time before me that I’ve made up my mind it’s best to let you have all the truth about yourself before anything happens to me.  All the truth about yourself—­as far as I know it.”

He paused again.  She was perfectly silent.  She trembled a little—­ wondering what she was going to hear.  It must be something dreadful, she thought,—­something for which she was unprepared,—­ something that might, perhaps, like a sudden change in the currents of the air, create darkness where there had been sunshine, storm instead of calm.  His grip on her hand was strong enough to hurt her, but she was not conscious of it.  She only wished he would tell her the worst at once and quickly.  The worst,—­for she instinctively felt there was no best.

“It was eighteen years ago this very haymaking time,” he went on, with a dreamy retrospective air as though he were talking to himself,—­“The last load had been taken in.  Supper was over.  The men had gone home,—­Priscilla was clearing the great hall, when there came on a sudden storm—­just a flash of lightning—­I can see it now, striking a blue fork across the windows—­a clap of thunder—­and then a regular downpour of rain.  Heavy rain, too,—­ buckets-full—­for it washed the yard out and almost swamped the garden.  I didn’t think much about it,—­the hay was hauled in dry, and that was all my concern.  I stood under a shed in the yard and watched the rain falling in straight sheets out of a sky black as pitch—­I could scarcely see my own hand if I stretched it out before me, the night was so dark.  All at once I heard the quick gallop of a horse’s hoofs some way off,—­then the sound seemed to die away,—­but presently I heard the hoofs coming at a slow steady pace down our muddy old by-road—­no one can gallop that, in any weather.  And almost before I knew how it came there, the horse was standing at the farmyard gate, with a man in the saddle carrying a bundle in front of him.  He was the handsomest fellow I ever saw, and when he dismounted and came towards me, and took off his cap in the pouring rain and smiled at me, I was fairly taken with his looks.  I thought he must be something of a king or other great personage by his very manner.  ‘Will you do me a kindness?’ he said, as gently as you please.  ’This is a farm, I believe.  I want to leave my little child here in safe keeping for a night.  She is such a baby,—­I cannot carry her any further through this storm.’  And he put aside the wrappings of the bundle he carried