s dead.... But I tell you that Adam is innocent.... There was
no harm in the lad ... a little rough at times ... but no harm ... he'd
no father to bring him up ... and his mother was a wanton ... so there
was only the foolish old woman to look after the boys ... but there's no
harm in the lad ... there's no harm!"

Her voice broke down now in a sob, her throat seemed choked, but with an
effort which seemed indeed amazing in one of her years, she controlled
her tears, and for a moment was silent. The gray twilight crept in
through the door of the cottage, where Mat, bareheaded and humble, still
waited for the order to go.

Sir Marmaduke would have interrupted the old woman's talk ere this, but
his limbs were now completely paralyzed: he might have been made of
stone, so rigid did he feel himself to be: a marble image, or else a
specter, a shadow-figure that existed yet could not move.

There was such passionate earnestness in the old woman's words that
everyone else remained dumb. Richard, whose heart was filled with dread,
who had endured agonies of anxiety since the disappearance of his
brother, had but one great desire, which was to spare to the kind soul a
knowledge which would mean death or worse to her.

As for Editha de Chavasse, she was a mere spectator still: so puzzled,
so bewildered that she was quite convinced at this moment, that she must
be mad. She could not encounter Marmaduke's eyes, try how she might. The
look in his face horrified her less than it mystified her. She
alone--save the murderer himself--knew that the man who lay in that deal
coffin out there was not the mysterious foreigner who had never existed.

But if not the stranger, then who was it, who was dead? and what had
Adam Lambert to do with the whole terrible deed?

Sue once more tried to lead Mistress Lambert gently away, but she pushed
the young girl aside quite firmly:

"Ye don't believe me?" she asked, looking from one face to the other,
"ye don't believe me, yet I tell ye all that Adam is innocent ... and
that the Lord will not allow the innocent to be unjustly condemned....
Aye! He will e'en let the dead arise, I say, and proclaim the innocence
of my lad!"

Her eyes--with dilated pupils and pale opaque rims--had the look of the
seer in them now; she gazed straight out before her into the rain-laden
air, and it seemed almost as if in it she could perceive visions of
avenging swords, of defending angels and accusing ghouls, that