She reeled; but the blow gave no pain to her
flesh. It seemed to her that but an instant
passed before she heard the rapid gallop of
his horse. The first impulse she obeyed was
absurd; she followed him. If she had told
her story more methodically it could never
have affected him so much, although it would
no doubt have ended in his quitting her.
She must explain all, or what would he
think? But Captain Arthur galloped as
though he were pursued by somebody not
quite so innocent as Lanna Tixel. A few
minutes of running through cool evening air,
caused that first impulse to die out.

Then she sat down under the blossoms of a
Maythorn hedge, picking industriously at its
leaves; and so she sat in a long reverie, till
the moon rose, and she heard groans of which
she had not earlier been conscious. At the
same time she saw, behind the opposite hedge,
a face covered with blood, which she took to
be a dead face. It was the living face of Mr.
Dank, who had returned to sense after his
thrashing. She could not go home to rest.
Terrified and vexed in spirit she fled, looking
like a shrouded corpse herself, towards the
moor, and then it was that she interrupted
the gossips' learned conversation.

"And how does the frog's bile act?" asked
Mrs. Noddison. "That," said Goody Fubs,
"I quite forgot to ask, I had it from a gossip
who is dead. No doubt it must be eaten."
Mrs. Noddison was not at all comfortless over
the departure of her husband. Free he would
earn nothing, after his last evening's work.
He might as well therefore be fed in jail. Her
skin too would be the sounder for a rest. The
baby was just one of those puny squalid
things that used to perish by thousands in
the wretched huts of a fine old English
peasantry, all of the olden time. Mrs.
Noddison was full of mother's care about it.
Goody Fubs was full of neighbourly advice,
and very eloquent upon the subject of her
nostrum, a black fetid mess containing nobody
knows what.

While the two gossips talked, the flying
clouds let fall a flying shower. Lanna was
still on the moor, and the sudden rain recalled
her to a sense of her position. She was
out, she recollected, at a strange hour. It
must be at the earliest ten o'clock, an hour
later than bed-time. Lanna turned homewards,
though there was no place so terrible
to her as home.

"Well then, if you will hold the child,"
said Goody Fubs to Mistress Noddison, "I'll
give it the remedy, and then it never shall
know harm again in this world." " Amen,
Goody, and thank you." When the child felt
the frog's bile in its throat it began to scream
mightily and choke, but the stuff nevertheless
was swallowed. At that instant, as Goody
stated afterwards, the rain suddenly ceased
to patter on the shingles. The child screamed
more and more. It went into convulsions.
The hut door had been left open, and indeed
almost broken to pieces by the constables. A
white figure glided by. "Ave Maria!"
groaned old Goody Fubs, not to be heard
through the screaming of the child, "there's
Lanna Tixel!" The child's face was black.
The fierceness of the screaming caused Lanna
to turn back, and stand irresolutely in the
doorway, ready to enter and bring help if she
were able. Goody Fubs made a great cross
with her fingers over her own wrinkled forehead,
and then flew at the delicate cheeks of
Lanna with her nails. Lanna fled again,
followed by loud shrieks from Mrs. Noddison;
the child's voice was gone, it lay dumb in a
dead struggle.

"O, the bile!" moaned Mrs. Noddison.

"The witch!" groaned Goody Fubs.

The two or three domestics living in the
Grange were in attendance on the barber
surgeon, busy, Lanna found, with Mr. Dank,
who had been waylaid and beaten, as she
understood. She knew then that it was no
ghost she had seen, and, pitying his condition,
though he was no friend to her, she tended by
the steward's bedside half the night through,
after she had paid a visit to her secret
chamber. His bruises were not serious, the
cut upon his head had been bound up, he had
been comfortably shaved, had been bled in
the arm, and had received an emetic. His
case therefore promised well, and towards
morning the surgeon left him quietly asleep,
and recommended Lanna to retire, at the
same time suggesting that she should bathe
her swollen nose with vinegar, and take a
powder, for she seemed to have had a very
ugly fall.

Lanna slept heavily for a great many hours,
and in the morning found that Mr. Dank,
though very much weakened, was not confined
to his bed: he was up and out, gone to
encounter Noddison in a formal and judicial
way before the squire and his brother justices.
Lanna, with aching heart and throbbing nose,
and a wide border of black round one of her
blue eyes, endeavoured to go through her
usual routine of duties. In the course of the
day they took her into Blickford.

Two little boys at play in a ditch about a
quarter of a mile out of the village, leaped up
when they saw her coming, and scampered on
before as fast as they were able, shouting her
name aloud. They had been put there as
scouts or look-out men, and had beguiled
their time while on their post with pitch and
toss. Lanna understood nothing of that, and
could not at all tell what it meant, when a
turn in the road brought her in sight of the
first houses in Blickford, and she saw the
whole village turning out with brooms to
meet her. Goody Fubs advancing as the
village champion, struck the poor orphan with
her broom, and then throwing away the
weapon, grappled with her. Men threw
stones at her, women pressed round, grappled
together and fought for the privilege of
pinching her or pulling at the rich locks of