but, every now and then, he became first
moody, aud then violent These paroxysms
lasted but a day or two; and it was Susan's
anxious care to keep their very existence
hidden and unknown. It is true that
occasional passers-by on that lonely road heard
sounds at night of knocking about of
furniture, blows, and cries, as of some tearing
demon within the solitary farm-house; but
these fits of violence usually occurred in the
night; and whatever had been their
consequence, Susan had tidied and redd up all
signs of aught unusual before the morning.
For, above all, she dreaded lest some one
might find out in what danger and peril she
occasionally was, and might assume a right
to take away her brother from her care.
The one idea of taking charge of him had
deepened and deepened with years. It was
graven into her mind as the object for which
she lived. The sacrifice she had made for
this object only made it more precious to her.
Besides, she separated the idea of the
docile, affectionate, loutish, indolent Will,
and kept it distinct from the terror which
the demon that occasionally possessed him
inspired her with. The one was her
flesh and her blood,—the child of her dead
mother; the other was some fiend who
came to torture and convulse the creature
she so loved. She believed that she fought
her brother's battle in holding down those
tearing hands, in binding whenever she could
those uplifted restless arms prompt and
prone to do mischief. All the time she
subdued him with her cunning or her strength,
she spoke to him in pitying murmurs, or
abused the third person, the fiendish enemy, in
no unmeasured tones. Towards morning the
paroxysm was exhausted, and he would fall
asleep, perhaps only to waken with evil and
renewed vigour. But when he was laid down
she would sally out to taste the fresh air,
and to work off her wild sorrow in cries and
mutterings to herself. The early labourers
saw her gestures at a distance, and thought
her as crazed as the idiot-brother who made
the neighbourhood a haunted place. But did
any chance person call at Yew Nook later, or
in the day, he would find Susan Dixon cold,
calm, collected; her manner curt, her wits
keen.

Once this fit of violence lasted longer than
usual. Susan's strength both of mind and
body was nearly worn out; she wrestled in
prayer that somehow it might end before she,
too, was driven mad; or, worse, might be
obliged to give up life's aim, and consign
Willie to a madhouse. From that moment
of prayer (as she afterwards superstitiously
thought) Willie calmed—and then he drooped
—and then he sank—and, last of all, he died,
in reality from physical exhaustion.

But he was so gentle and tender as he lay
on his dying bed; such strange childlike
gleams of returning intelligence came over
his face long after the power to make his
dull inarticulate sounds had departed, that
Susan was attracted to him by a stronger tie
than she had ever felt before. It was
something to have even an idiot loving her with
dumb, wistful, animal affection; something
to have any creature looking at her with
such beseeching eyes, imploring protection
from the insidious enemy stealing on. And
yet she knew that to him death was no
enemy but a true friend, restoring light
and health to his poor clouded mind. It
was to her that death was an enemy; to
her, the survivor, when Willie died: there
was no one to love her. Worse doom still,
there was no one left on earth for her to
love.

You now know why no wandering tourist
could persuade her to receive him as a lodger;
why no tired traveller could melt her heart
to give him rest and refreshment; why long
habits of seclusion had given her a moroseness
of manner, and care for the interests of
another had rendered her keen and miserly.

But there was a third act in the drama of
her life.

CHAPTER V.

IN spite of Peggy's prophecy that Susan's
life should not seem long, it did seem wearisome
and endless as year by year slowly
uncoiled their monotonous circles. To be sure,
she might have made change for herself, but
she did not care to do it. It was, indeed,
more than "not caring" which merely implies
a certain degree of vis inertiae to be subdued
before an object can be attained, and that the
object itself does not seem to be of sufficient
importance to call out the requisite energy.
On the contrary, Susan exerted herself to
avoid change and variety. She had a morbid
dread of new faces, which originated in her
desire to keep poor dead Willie's state a
profound secret. She had a contempt for new
customs; and indeed her old ways prospered
so well under her active hand and vigilant
eye, that it was difficult to know how they
could be improved upon. She was regularly
present in Coniston market with the best
butter and the earliest chickens of the season.
Those were the common farm produce that
every farmer's wife about had to sell; but
Susan, after she had disposed of the more
feminine articles, turned to on the man's side.
A better judge of a horse or cow there was
not in all the country round. Yorkshire
itself might have attempted to jockey her,
and would have failed. Her corn was sound
and clean; her potatoes well preserved to the
latest spring. People began to talk of the
hoards of money Susan Dixon must have
laid up somewhere; and one young ne'er-do-
well of a farmer's son undertook to make
love to the woman of forty, who looked fifty-
five, if a day. He made up to her by opening
a gate on the road-path home, as she was
riding on a bare-backed horse, her purchase
not an hour ago. She was off before him,