s. Hurd went on in a torrent of half-finished sentences and fragments
of remembered talk. She told her husband's story of the encounter with
the keepers as he had told it to her, of course with additions and
modifications already struck out by the agony of inventive pain; she
described how she had made him take his blood-stained clothes and hide
them in a hole in the roof; then how she had urged him to strike across
country at once and get a few hours start before the ghastly business
was known. But the more he talked to her the more confident he became of
his own story, and the more determined to stay and brave it out.
Besides, he was shrewd enough to see that escape for a man of his
deformity was impossible, and he tried to make her understand it so. But
she was mad and blind with fear, and at last, just as the light was
coming in, he told her roughly, to end their long wrestle, that he
should go to bed and get some sleep. She would make a fool of him, and
he should want all his wits. She followed him up the steep ladder to
their room, weeping. And there was little Willie sitting up in bed,
choking with the phlegm in his throat, and half dead of fright because
of the voices below.

"And when Hurd see him, he went and cuddled him up, and rubbed his legs
and feet to warm them, an' I could hear him groanin'. And I says to him,
'Jim, if you won't go for my sake, will you go for the boy's?' For you
see, miss, there was a bit of money in the house, an' I thought he'd
hide himself by day and walk by night, and so get to Liverpool perhaps,
and off to the States. An' it seemed as though my head would burst with
listening for people comin', and him taken up there like a rat in a
trap, an' no way of provin' the truth, and everybody agen him, because
of the things he'd said. And he burst out a-cryin', an' Willie cried.
An' I came an' entreated of him. An' he kissed me; an' at last he said
he'd go. An' I made haste, the light was getting so terrible strong; an'
just as he'd got to the foot of the stairs, an' I was holding little
Willie in my arms an' saying good-bye to him--"

She let her head sink against the settle. There was no more to say, and
Marcella asked no more questions--she sat thinking. Willie stood, a
wasted, worn figure, by his mother, stroking her face; his hoarse
breathing was for the time the only sound in the cottage.

Then Marcella heard a loud knock at the door. She got up and looked
through the casement wind