, her bosom heaved like the sea; her arm bared to the shoulder
could have struck a man down. Yet in the midst of her frenzied speech,
in full flow, she faltered. Her fists unclenched themselves, her arm
dropped nerveless, her eyes sought the ground. Andrew King, pale with
rage, sterner than she had ever seen him, stood before her.

He looked at her with deadly calm.

"Be out of this," he said; "you degrade yourself. Never let me see you
again." Before she had shrunk away he had stooped to the huddled
creature at his feet, had covered her with his arms and was whispering
urgent comfort in her ear, caressing her with voice and hands. Bessie
Prawle could not show herself to the neighbours for the rest of the
summer and early autumn. She became a solitary; the neighbours said
that she was in a decline.

The drought, with all the troubles it entailed of plague, pestilence
and famine, continued through August and September. It did not really
break till All-Hallow's, and then, indeed, it did.

The day had been overcast, with a sky of a coppery tinge, and
intensely dry heat; a chance puff of wind smote one in the face, hot
as the breath of a man in fever. The sheep panted on the ground, their
dry tongues far out of their mouths; the beasts lay as if dead, and
flies settled upon them in clouds. All the land was of one glaring
brown, where the bents were dry straw, and the heather first burnt
and then bleached pallid by the sun. The distance was blurred in a
reddish lurid haze; Knapp Fell and its forest were hidden.

Mabilla, the dumb girl, had been restless all day, following Andrew
about like a shadow. The heat had made him irritable; more than once
he had told her to go home and she had obeyed him for the time, but
had always come back. Her looks roamed wide; she seemed always
listening; sometimes it was clear that she heard something--for she
panted and moved her lips. There was deep trouble in her eyes too; she
seemed full of fear. At almost any other time her husband would have
noticed it and comforted her. But his nerves, fretted by the long
scorching summer, were on this day of fire stretched to the cracking
point. He saw nothing, and felt nothing, but his own discomfort.

Out on the parched fell-side Bessie Prawle sat like a bird of omen and
gloomed at the wrath to come.

Toward dusk a wind came moaning down the valley, raising little spires
of dust. It came now down, now up. Sometimes two currents met each
other