; and her little daughter, a more romantic
figure than ever, in the public eye, was to find, it said, a second
mother in Lady Tatham.

The rain clouds were swirling through the dale, as Boden reached its
middle point, pushing his way against a cold westerly blast. The stream,
which in summer chatters so gently to the travellers beside it, was
rushing in a brown swift flood, and drowning the low meadows on its
western bank. He mounted a stone foot-bridge to look at it, when, of a
sudden, the curtain of cloud shrouding Blencathra was torn aside, and
its high ridge, razor-sharp, appeared spectrally white, a seat of the
storm-god, in a far heaven. The livid lines of just-fallen snow,
outlining the cliffs and ravines of the great mountain, stamped its
majesty, visionlike, on the senses. Below it, some scattered woods, inky
black, bent under the storm, and the crash and darkness of the lower air
threw into clear relief the pallid splendour of the mountain-top.

Boden stood enthralled, when a voice said at his elbow:

"Yo're oot on a clashy night, Muster Boden!"

He turned. Beside him stood the fugitive!--grinning weakly. Boden beheld
a tottering and ghastly figure. Distress--mortal fatigue--breathed from
the haggard emaciation of face and limbs. Round the shoulders was folded
a sack, from which the dregs of some red dipping mixture it had once
contained had dripped over the youth's chest and legs, his tattered
clothes and broken boots, in streams of what, to Boden's startled sense,
looked like blood. And under the slouched hat, a pair of sunken eyes
looked out, expressing the very uttermost of human despair.

"Brand!--where have you been?"

"Don't touch me, sir! I'll go--don't touch me! There ha' been hunnerds
after me--latin me on t' fells. They've not catcht me--an' they'd not ha'
catcht me noo--but I'm wore oot. I ha' been followin yo' this half-hour,
Muster Boden. I could ha' put yo' i' the river fasst enoof."

A ghastly chuckle in the darkness. Boden considered.

"Well, now--are you going to give yourself up? You see--I can do nothing
to force you! But if you take my advice, you'll go quietly with me, to
the police--you'll make a clean breast of it."

"Will they hang me, Muster Boden?"

"I don't think so," said Boden slowly. "What made you do it?"

"I'd planned it for months--I've follered owd Melrose many times--I've
been close oop to 'im--when he had noa noshun whativver. I might ha'
killt him--a doosen ti