ound for her guidance. The
humped and raw-edged frozen earth hurt her feet. The speed they went at
shook the breath out of her lungs. At an easy, comfortable pace, the
lantern bobbed its way into the orchard and up towards the garden. She
was the lucky woman, Marion.

"Good," said Richard, as they passed through the gate. "You did that in
fine style."

"Why do you need to hurry so?" she protested. "You have all night now to
ask her where she has been."

"I want to find out if she has been to his tomb," he repeated with dull,
drilling persistence.

When they came to the end of the garden he drew up sharply. "Why is she
standing by the servant's door? Why the devil is she always doing such
extraordinary things?"

Ellen saw in front of her, through a screen of bushes that ran from the
left-hand corner of the house to the left wall of the garden, the steady
rays of the lantern come to rest. "You'd better go and ask her," she
said pettishly.

He crossed the lawn quickly and halted before a trellis arch which
pierced this screen, and motioned her to go before him. At that moment
there came the sound of knocking near by. He caught his breath, pressed
on her heels impatiently, and when they entered the tiled yard brushed
past her and walked towards the lantern, which was close to the door in
the side of the house, calling querulously: "Mother! Mother!"

The light swung and wavered. "What is the woman up to?" thought Ellen
crossly. The strong yellow rays of the lantern dazzled before them and
prevented them from seeing anything of its bearer, though the moonlight
beams were still unclouded.

"Mother!" Richard cried irascibly, and levelled the torch on her like a
revolver.

Its brightness showed the dewy roundness, towsled with perplexity, of a
doe-eyed girl of Ellen's age.

"Ach!" said Richard, shouting with rage. "Who are you? Who are you?"

It struck Ellen that his refusal of any recognition of the girl's
sweetness was unnatural; that it would have been more sane and
wholesome, though it would have pricked her jealousy, if he had shown
some flush of pleasure at this gentle, bucolic, nut-brown beauty.

"Please, sir," gabbled the girl with her wet, foolish, pretty lips, "I'm
Annie Brickett, and your cook's my auntie, and I come over to say my
married sister's had a little baby, and it's before her time, so would
auntie give us the clothes she was making?"

The door opened, and aproned figures looked out of the k