sgiven her often, but she did not say
so now.

"In the clearin's all round Turrifs they buried on their own lands,"
she said, still sullen.

"Ye buried him on his own land!" he exclaimed, the wonder of it growing
upon him. "When? Where? Out with it! Make a clean breast of it."

"I buried him that night. The coffin slipped easy enough out of the
window and on the dry leaves when I dragged it. I laid him between the
rocks at the side, just under where the bank was going to fall, and then
I went up and pushed the bank down upon him." She looked up and cried
defiantly: "Father'd as soon lie there as in a cemetery!" Although it
was as if she was crushing beneath her heel that worship of
conventionality which had made Bates try to send the body so far to a
better grave, there was still in her last words a tone of pathos which
surprised even herself. Something in the softening influences which had
been about her since that crisis of her young life made her feel more
ruth at the recital of the deed than she had felt at its doing. "I made
a bed of moss and leaves," she said, "and I shut up the ledge he lay in
with bits of rock, so that naught could touch him."

"But--but I dug there," cried Bates. (In his surprise the nervous
affection of his breath had largely left him.) "I dug where the bank had
fallen; for I had strange thoughts o' what ye might have been driven to
when I was long alone, and I dug, but his body wasna' there."

It was curious that, even after her confession, he should feel need to
excuse himself for his suspicion.

"There was a sort of cleft sideways in the rock at the side of the
stream; you'd never have seen it, for I only saw it myself by hanging
over, holding by a tree. No one would ever have thought o' digging there
when I'd closed up the opening with stones; I thought o' that when I put
him in."

He got up and took a step or two about, but he gave no gesture or prayer
or word of pain. "The sin lies at my door," he said.

"Well, yes, Mr. Bates, you drove me to it, but--"

Her tone, so different from his, he interrupted. "Don't say 'but,'
making it out less black. Tell what ye did more."

Then she told him, coolly enough, how she had arranged the bedclothes to
look as though, she slept under them: how she had got into the box
because, by reason of the knot-hole in the lid, she had been able to
draw it over her, and set the few nails that were hanging in it in their
places. She told him how she