d him coming, and
ran back again, and returned with the singing 'tea-kitchen,' and then
away again, for the thin buttered toast under its china cover, which our
ancestors loved.

Then she listened--but 'twas a mistake--it was the Widow Macan's step,
who carried the ten pailfuls of water up from the river to fill the butt
in the backyard every Tuesday and Friday, for a shilling a week, and 'a
cup o' tay with the girls in the kitchen.'

Then Moggy lighted the fire with the stump of a candle, for the night
was a little chill, and she set the small round table beside it, and
laid her master's pipe and tobacco-box on it, and listened, and began to
wonder what detained him.

So she went out into the sharp still air, and stood on the hall-door
step, and listened again. Presently she heard the Widow Macan walking up
from the garden with the last pail on her head, who stopped when she saw
her, and set down the vessel upon the corner of the clumsy little
balustrade by the door-step. So Moggy declared her uneasiness, which
waxed greater when Mrs. Macan told her that 'the masther, God bless him,
wasn't in the garden.'

She had seen him standing at the river's edge, while she passed and
repassed. He did not move a finger, or seem to notice her, and was
looking down into the water. When she came back the third or fourth
time, he was gone.

At Moggy's command she went back into the garden, though she assured
her, solemnly--''twas nansince lookin' there'--and called Mr. Nutter, at
first in a deferential and hesitating way; but, emboldened and excited
by the silence, for she began to feel unaccountably queer, in a louder
and louder a key, till she was certain that he was neither in the garden
nor in the orchard, nor anywhere near the house. And when she stopped,
the silence seemed awful, and the darkness under the trees closed round
her with a supernatural darkness, and the river at the foot of the walk
seemed snorting some inarticulate story of horror. So she locked the
garden door quickly, looking over her shoulder for she knew not what,
and ran faster than she often did along the sombre walk up to the hall
door, and told her tale to Moggy, and begged to carry the pail in by the
hall-door.

In they came, and Moggy shut the hall-door, and turned the key in it.
Perhaps 'twas the state in which the poor lady lay up stairs that helped
to make them excited and frightened. Betty was sitting by her bedside,
and Toole had been there,