refusing his civility; but the remounting was
not so easy, and rather than fail she did not
choose to attempt it. She walked, and he
walked alongside, improving his opportunity,
which, as he vainly thought, had been
consciously granted to him. As they drew near
Yew Nook, he ventured on some expression
of a wish to keep company with her. His
words were vague and clumsily arranged.
Susan turned round and coolly asked him to
explain himself. He took courage, as he
thought of her reputed wealth, and expressed
his wishes this second time pretty plainly.
To his surprise the reply she made was in a
series of smart strokes across his shoulders,
administered through the medium of a supple
hazel-switch.

"Take that!" said she, almost breathless,
"to teach thee how thou darest make a fool
of an honest woman, old enough to be thy
mother. If thou com'st a step nearer the
house, there's a good horse-pool, and there's
two stout fellows who'll like no better fun
than ducking thee. Be off wi' thee."

And she strode into her own premises,
never looking round to see whether he obeyed
her injunction or not.

Sometimes three or four years would pass
over without her hearing Michael Hurst's
name mentioned. She used to wonder at
such times whether he were dead or alive.
She would sit for hours by the dying embers
of her fire on a winter's evening, trying to
recall the scenes of her youth; trying to
bring up living pictures of the faces she had
then known—Michael's most especially. She
thought that it was possible, so long had been
the lapse of years, that she might now pass
by him in the street unknowing and unknown.
His outward form she might not recognise,
but himself she should feel in the thrill of
her whole being. He could not pass her
unawares.

What little she did hear about him all
testified a downwards tendency. He drank,
—not at stated times when there was no
other work to be done, but continually,
whether it was seed-time or harvest. His
children were ill at one time; then one died,
while the others recovered, but were poor
sickly things. No one dared to give Susan
any direct intelligence of her former lover;
many avoided all mention of his name in her
presence; but a few spoke out either in
indifference to, or ignorance of, those by-gone days,
Susan heard every word, every whisper,
every sound that related to him. But
her eye never changed, nor did a muscle of
her face move.

Late one November night she sate over her
fire; not a human being besides herself in the
house; none but she had ever slept there
since Willie's death. The farm-labourers had
foddered the cattle and gone home hours
before. There were crickets chirping all
round the warm hearth-stones, there was the
clock ticking with the peculiar beat Susan had
known ever since childhood, and which then
and ever since she had oddly associated with
the idea of a mother and child talking together,
one loud tick, and quick—a feeble sharp one
following.

The day had been keen, and piercingly
cold. The whole lift of heaven seemed a
dome of iron. Black and frost-bound was
the earth under the cruel east wind. Now
the wind had dropped, and as the darkness
had gathered in, the weather-wise old
labourers prophesied snow. The sounds in
the air arose again, as Susan sate still and
silent. They were of a different character to
what they had been during the prevalence of
the east wind. Then they had been shrill and
piping; now they were like low distant growling;
not unmusical, but strangely threatening.
Susan went to the window, and drew aside
the little curtain. The whole world was
white, the air was blinded with the swift and
heavy downfal of snow. At present it came
down straight, but Susan knew those distant
sounds in the hollows and gullies of the hills
portended a driving wind and a more cruel
storm. She thought of her sheep; were
they all folded? the new-born calf, was it
bedded well ? Before the drifts were formed
too deep for her to pass in and out—and by
the morning she judged that they would be
six or seven feet deep—she would go out and
see after the comfort of her beasts. She
took a lantern, and tied a shawl over her
head, and went out into the open air. She
cared tenderly for all her animals, and was
returning, when borne on the blast as if
some spirit-cry—for it seemed to come rather
down from the skies than from any creature
standing on earth's level—she heard a
voice of agony; she could not distinguish
words; it seemed rather as if some bird of
prey was being caught in the whirl of the
icy wind, and torn and tortured by its
violence. Again! up high above! Susan put
down her lantern, and shouted loud in
return; it was an instinct, for if the creature
were not human, which she had doubted
but a moment before, what good could her
responding cry do ? And her cry was seized
on by the tyrannous wind, and borne farther
away in the opposite direction to that from
which that call of agony had proceeded.
Again she listened; no sound: then again it
rang through space; and this time she was
sure it was human. She turned into the
house, and heaped turf and wood on the fire,
which, careless of her own sensations, she
had allowed to fade and almost die out.
She put a new candle in her lantern; she
changed her shawl for a maud, and leaving
the door on latch, she sallied out. Just at the
moment when her ear first encountered the
weird noises of the storm, on issuing forth into
the open air, she thought she heard the words,
"O God! O, help!" They were a guide
to her, if words they were, for they came
straight from a rock not a quarter of a mile