on one arm, and press the cordial to her lips with the other hand. It
was an overdose, but that hardly mattered; and before very long, just as
she was beginning to quiet down, there approached a fresh sound of
screaming, and his mother burst into the house. "Oh, my poor man! My
poor Dan!" she cried. "They have got him! The soldiers have got him!"
and, as John was laying down his aunt to come and hear, she rushed up
the stairs with, "And it is all your doing, you unnatural,
good-for-nothing varmint! That was what you were after all night, you
and your aunt, the adder that I have warmed at my bosom! Turning
against your own poor father, to set them bloody-minded soldiers on him!
And now he'll be taken and hanged, and I shall be a poor miserable
widow woman all along of you!"

This was poured forth as fast as the words would come out of Molly's
mouth, but before they had all streamed forth, Judith was choking in a
hysterical fit, so like a convulsion that Johnnie could only cry, "Aunt!
aunt! Mother, look!" And Molly herself was frightened, and began to
say, "There! there!" while she helped him to hold her sister, and little
Judy flew off, half in terror and half in search of help, crying out
that aunt was in a fit.

Help of a certain sort came--a good deal more of it than was wanted--and
the room was crowded up, and there were a good many "Poor dears!"
"There, nows!" and proposals of burnt feathers and vinegar; but Mrs
Spurrell, who was reckoned the most skilled in illness, came at last,
put the others out, especially as they wanted to see about their
husbands' teas, and brought a sort of quiet, in which Judith lay
exhausted, but shuddering now and then, and Molly sobbed by the fire.
John gathered from the exclamations that the Carbonel family were safe
somewhere, that Miss Sophy had gone on like the woman preacher at
Downhill, that Greenhow had been on fire, but nobody was hurt, though
the soldiers had ridden in upon them, "so as was a shame to see," and
had got poor Dan and Ned Fell, and all sure locked up.

John was shocked at this, for he had not meant to do more than send
Captain Carbonel home to protect his family, and had not realised all
the consequences. In a few minutes more, however, his father himself
tramped in, and the first thing he did was to fall on the lad in a fury,
grasping him by the collar, with horrible abuse of him for an unnatural
informer, turning against his own father, and dealing a