g, like young Tamlane, might have sojourned with them for
ever and a day, but for one thing. He saw by chance a seventh
maiden--a white-faced, woe-begone, horror-struck Seventh Sister,
blenched and frozen under a great beech. She may have been there
throughout his commerce with the rest, or she may have been revealed
to him in a flash then and there. So as it was he saw her suddenly,
and thereafter saw no other at all. She held his eyes waking; he left
his playmates and went to her where she crouched. He stooped and took
her hand. It was as cold as a dead girl's and very heavy. Amid the
screaming of the others, undeterred by their whirling and battling, he
lifted up the frozen one. He lifted her bodily and carried her in his
arms. They swept all about him like infuriated birds. The sound of
their rage was like that of gulls about a fish in the tide-way; but
they laid no hands on him, and said nothing that he could understand,
and by this time his awe was gone, and his heart was on fire. Holding
fast to what he had and wanted, he pushed out of Knapp Forest and took
the lee-side of the Edge on his way to Dryhope. This must have been
about the time of the gale at its worst. The Seventh Sister by Silent
Water may have fallen at this time; for had not Andrew King the
Seventh Sister in his arms?

Anxiety as to the fate of Andrew King was spread over the village and
the greatest sympathy felt for the bereaved family. To have lost a
flock of sheep, a dog, and an only child at one blow is a terrible
misfortune. Old King, I am told, was prostrated, and the girl, Bessie
Prawle, violent in her lamentations over her "lad." The only person
unmoved was the youth's mother, Miranda King the widow. She, it seems,
had no doubts of his safety, and declared that he "would come in his
time, like his father before him"--a saying which, instead of
comforting the mourners, appears to have exasperated them. Probably
they did not at all understand it. Such consolations as Mr. Robson the
minister had to offer she received respectfully, but without comment.
All she had to say was that she could trust her son; and when he urged
that she had better by far trust in God, her reply, finally and
shortly, was that God was bound by His own laws and had not given us
heads and hearts for nothing. I am free to admit that her theology
upon this point seems to me remarkably sound.

In the course of the 13th, anxious day as it promised to be, old
George King,