ously.

"What does it say?"

"It's very disrespectful," said Crefton; "it says she's a witch. Such
things ought not to be written up."

"It's true, every word of it," said his listener with considerable
satisfaction, adding as a special descriptive note of her own, "the old
toad."

And as she hobbled away through the farmyard she shrilled out in her
cracked voice, "Martha Pillamon is an old witch!"

"Did you hear what she said?" mumbled a weak, angry voice somewhere
behind Crefton's shoulder. Turning hastily, he beheld another old
crone, thin and yellow and wrinkled, and evidently in a high state of
displeasure. Obviously this was Martha Pillamon in person. The
orchard seemed to be a favourite promenade for the aged women of the
neighbourhood.

"'Tis lies, 'tis sinful lies," the weak voice went on. "'Tis Betsy
Croot is the old witch. She an' her daughter, the dirty rat. I'll put
a spell on 'em, the old nuisances."

As she limped slowly away her eye caught the chalk inscription on the
barn door.

"What's written up there?" she demanded, wheeling round on Crefton.

"Vote for Soarker," he responded, with the craven boldness of the
practised peacemaker.

The old woman grunted, and her mutterings and her faded red shawl lost
themselves gradually among the tree-trunks. Crefton rose presently and
made his way towards the farm-house. Somehow a good deal of the peace
seemed to have slipped out of the atmosphere.

The cheery bustle of tea-time in the old farm kitchen, which Crefton
had found so agreeable on previous afternoons, seemed to have soured
to-day into a certain uneasy melancholy. There was a dull, dragging
silence around the board, and the tea itself, when Crefton came to
taste it, was a flat, lukewarm concoction that would have driven the
spirit of revelry out of a carnival.

"It's no use complaining of the tea," said Mrs. Spurfield hastily, as
her guest stared with an air of polite inquiry at his cup. "The kettle
won't boil, that's the truth of it."

Crefton turned to the hearth, where an unusually fierce fire was banked
up under a big black kettle, which sent a thin wreath of steam from its
spout, but seemed otherwise to ignore the action of the roaring blaze
beneath it.

"It's been there more than an hour, an' boil it won't," said Mrs.
Spurfield, adding, by way of complete explanation, "we're bewitched."

"It's Martha Pillamon as has done it," chimed in the old mother; "I'll
be even wit