boy in the smithy, stole away to her own home
with ghastly stories of the blacksmith's illness and delirium.

At first the neighbors came to inquire, prompted partly by curiosity,
but mainly by fear. Mrs. Garth shut the door, and refused to open it
to any comers.

To enforce seclusion was not long a necessity. Desertion was soon the
portion of the Garths, mother and son. More swift than a bad name
passed the terrible conviction among the people at Wythburn that at
last, at long last, the plague, the plague itself, was in their midst.

The smithy cottage stood by the bridge, and to reach the market town
by the road it was necessary to pass it within five yards. Pitiful,
indeed, were the artifices to escape contagion resorted to by some who
professed the largest faith in the will of God. They condemned
themselves to imprisonment within their own houses, or abandoned their
visits to Gaskarth, or made a circuit of a mile across the breast of a
hill, in order to avoid coming within range of the proscribed
dwelling.

After three days of rumor and surmise, there was not a soul in the
district would go within fifty yards of the house that was believed to
hold the pestilence. No doctor approached it, for none had been
summoned. The people who brought provisions left them in the road
outside, and hailed the inmates. Mrs. Garth sat alone with her
stricken son, and if there had been eyes to see her there in her
solitude and desolation, perhaps the woman who seemed hard as flint to
the world was softening in her sorrow. When the delirium passed away,
and Garth lay conscious, but still feverish, his mother was bewailing
their desertion.

"None come nigh to us, Joey, none come nigh. That's what the worth of
neighbors is, my lad. They'd leave us to die, both on us; they'd leave
us alone to die, and none wad come nigh."

"Alone, mother! Did you say alone?" asked Garth.

"We're not alone, mother. Some one _has_ come nigh to us."

Mrs. Garth looked up amazed, and half turned in her seat to glance
watchfully around.

"Mother," said Garth, "did you ever pray?"

"Hod thy tongue, lad, hod thy tongue," said Mrs. Garth, with a
whimper.

"Did you ever pray, mother?" repeated Garth, his red eyes aflame, and
his voice cracking in his throat. "Whisht, Joey, whisht!"

"Mother, we've not lived over well, you and I; but maybe God would
forgive us, after all."

"Hod thy tongue, my lad; do, now, do."

Mrs. Garth fumbled with the bedcl