So saying, the unwelcome guest opened the outer door and walked away into the raging storm and darkness,--a less bitter storm it seemed to him now than that created by the violent woman within doors. Some way further on he espied a haystack, under which he lay down, as he had done on many another night before this, and there he slept in the wind and the snow until morning. Moll, meanwhile, enraged beyond words at the loss of her cream, stalked off for a pail and cloth, and set herself to wash the floor, muttering curses as she did so. Never a glance did she cast at the corner by the fire where little Jan still lay by the hearth-stone, motionless and strangely quiet; he, the restless imp, who was usually so full of life. Never a glance, until, the centre of the floor being at last clean again, Moll, on her knees, came with her pail of soap-suds to the white river that surrounded the corner of the kitchen where Jan lay. A white river? Nay, there was a crimson river that mingled with it; a stream of crimson drops that flowed from the stone under the child's head. Moll leapt to her feet on the instant. What ailed the boy? She had beaten him, it is true, but then she had beaten him often before this in his father's absence. A beating was nothing new to little Jan. Why had he fallen? What made him lie so still? She turned him over. Ah! it was easy to see the reason. As she flung him from her in her rage, the child in his fall had struck his head against the sharp edge of the hearth-stone, and there he lay now, with the life-blood steadily flowing from his temple. A feeling that Rough Moll had never been conscious of before gripped her heart at the sight. Was her boy dead? Had she killed him? What would his father say? What would her husband call her? A murderer? Was she that? Was that what the Stranger had meant when he had looked at her with those piercing eyes? He might have called her a liar, at the sight of the churn full of cream, but he had not done so; and little she would have cared if he had. But a murderer! Was murder in her heart? Lifting Jan as carefully as she could, she carried him upstairs to the small bedroom under the roof, where he usually lay on a tiny pallet by her side. But this night the child's small figure lay in the wide bed, and big Moll, with all her clothes on, hung over him; or if she lay down for a moment or two, it was only on the hard little pallet by his side. All that night Moll watched. But all that night Jan never moved. All the next day he lay unconscious, while Moll did her clumsy utmost to staunch the wound in his forehead. Long before it was light, she tried to send one of her maids for the doctor; but the storm was now so violent that none could leave or enter the house.