he said, without a sign of surprise. "You are
welcome back to your native village. When your old comrade did not know
you, I, whose eyes are dim with the sorrow of eighty years, recognised
you at once. They may well call me the wise woman."

"Good God!" was all I could say. "Can this be Madge?"

"This is Madge," she said, "who has lived long enough to see and to
bless the man who saw and comforted her poor lost boy in prison, when
all beside fell off from him. The Lord reward you for it."

"How did you know that, Madge?"

"Ask a witch where she gets her information!" laughed she. "God forgive
me. I'll tell you how it was. One of the turnkeys in that very prison
was a Cooper, a Hampshire gipsy, and he, knowing my boy to be
half-blooded, passed all the facts on through the tribes to me, who am
a mother among them! Did you see him die?" she added, eagerly putting
her great bony hand upon my arm, and looking up in my face.

"No! no! mother," I answered: "I hadn't courage for that."

"I heard he died grim," she continued, half to herself. "He should a
done. There was a deal of wild blood in him from both sides. Are you
going up to the woodlands, to see the old place? 'Tis all in ruins now;
and the choughs and stares are building and brooding in the chimney
nook where I nursed him. I shall not have much longer to wait; I only
stayed for this. Goodbye."

And she was gone; and Gosford, relieved by her departure, was
affectionately lugging me off to his house. Oh, the mixture of wealth
and discomfort that house exhibited! Oh, the warm-hearted jollity of
every one there! Oh, to see those three pretty, well-educated girls
taking their father off by force, and making him clean himself in
honour of my arrival! Oh, the merry evening we had! What, though the
cider disagreed with me? What, though I knew it would disagree with me
at the time I drank it? That noisy, jolly night in the old Devonshire
grange was one of the pleasantest of my life.

And, to my great surprise, the Vicar came in in the middle of it, and
made himself very agreeable to me. He told me that old Madge, as far as
he could see, was a thoroughly converted and orderly person, having
thrown aside all pretence of witchcraft. That she lived on some trifle
of hoarded money of her own, and a small parish allowance that she had;
and that she had only come back to the parish some six years since,
after wandering about as a gipsy in almost every part of England. He
wa