e whole building shone against the burnt hillside.
It was too far away for me to spy Mrs. Bolverson's blue print gown
within the kitchen window, but I knew that she stood there yet.

The sound of a footstep made me turn. A woman was coming round the
corner of the cottage, with a bundle of mint in her hand.

She looked at me, shook off a bee that had blundered against her
apron, and looked at me again--a brown woman, lean and strongly made,
with jet-black eyes set deep and glistening in an ugly face.

"You want to know your way?" she asked.

"No. I came to see you, if your name is Sarah Gedye."

"Sarah Ann Gedye is my name. What 'st want?"

I took a sudden resolution to tell the exact truth.

"Mrs. Gedye, the fact is I am curious about an old charm that was
practised in these parts, as I know, till recently. The charm is
this--When a woman guesses her lover to be faithless to her, she
buries a suit of his old clothes to fetch him back to her. Mrs.
Bolverson, up at Sheba yonder--"

The old woman had opened her mouth (as I know now) to curse me. But
as Mrs. Bolverson's name escaped me, she turned her back, and walked
straight to her door and into the kitchen. Her manner told me that I
was expected to follow.

But I was not prepared for the face she turned on me in the shadow of
the kitchen. It was grey as wood-ash, and the black eyes shrank into
it like hot specks of fire.

"She--_she_ set you on to ask me that?" She caught me by the coat and
hissed out: "Come back from the door--don't let her see." Then she
lifted up her fist, with the mint tightly clutched in it, and shook it
at the warm patch of Sheba buildings across the valley.

"May God burn her bones, as He has smitten her body barren!"

"What do you know of this?" she cried, turning upon me again.

"I know nothing. That I have offered you some insult is clear: but--"

"Nay, you don't know--you don't know. No man would be such a hound.
You don't know; but, by the Lord, you shall hear, here where you'm
standin', an' shall jedge betwix' me an' that pale 'ooman up yonder.
Stand there an' list to me.

"He was my lover more'n five-an'-thirty years agone. Who? That
'ooman's wedded man, Seth Bolverson. We warn't married"--this with
a short laugh. "Wife or less than wife, he found me to his mind.
She--she that egged you on to come an' flout me--was a pale-haired
girl o' seventeen or so i' those times--a church-goin' mincin' strip
of a girl--the sort you me