"I got un now," he said; "now I don't mind coming out. You see if I
don't pay you out for this! Why, I always took you for a reasonable
hanimal."

He shook his fist strongly at the river, which had him well up to the
middle by this time; and then he disdainfully waded out, with wrath in
all his countenance.

"I've a great mind to stop there, and see what her would do," he said to
me, forgetting altogether what he went for. "And I would, if I had had
my dinner. A scat of a thing as I can manage with my thumb! Ah, you have
made a bad day of it."

"But what have you found, Mr. Withypool?" I asked, for I could not enter
into his wrath against the water, wet as he was to the shoulders. "You
have something in your hand. May I see it, if you please? And then do
please to go home and change your clothes."

"A thing I never did in my life, miss, and should be ashamed to begin at
this age. Clothes gets wet, and clothes dries on us, same as un did on
the sheep afore us; else they gets stiff and creasy. What this little
thing is ne'er a body may tell, in my line of life--but look'th
aristocratic."

The "mullock," as he called it, from his hands, and from the bed where
it had lain so long, so crusted the little thing which he gave me, that
I dipped it again in the swelling stream, and rubbed it with both hands,
to make out what it was. And then I thought how long it had lain there;
and suddenly to my memory it came, that in all likelihood the time of
that was nineteen years this very day.

"Will another year pass," I cried, "before I make out all about it? What
are you, and who, now looking at me with such sad, sad eyes?"

For I held in my hand a most handsome locket, of blue enamel and
diamonds, with a back of chased gold, and in front the miniature of a
beautiful young woman, done as they never seem to do them now. The
work was so good, and the fitting so close, that no drop of water had
entered, and the face shone through the crystal glass as fresh as the
day it was painted. A very lovely face it was, yet touched with a shade
of sadness, as the loveliest faces generally are; and the first thought
of any beholder would be, "That woman was born for sorrow."

The miller said as much when I showed it to him.

"Lord bless my heart! I hope the poor craitur' hathn't lasted half so
long as her pictur' hath."

CHAPTER XLIV

HERMETICALLY SEALED

The discovery which I have described above (but not half so well as
t