The woman, amid that strange silence, began to speak in a low voice. The rain was still falling, and the eaves dripped outside. The cold light which found its way into the room showed her white to the lips. But she told without faltering her tale of the storm which had fallen on the moor when the child rubbed the cross; and no one doubted it, any more than, to do her justice, she doubted it herself. For was she not confirmed by the presence of the cross itself, which lay in the middle of the table for all to see! They looked at it with horror, never doubting that the knots were devil's knots, that the wood of which it was formed came from no earthly tree. Meantime the child, terrified by the stern, harsh faces and the glances of unintelligible abhorrence which met him wherever he looked, had no wit to understand the charge made against him. He knew only that the cross had something to do with it--that it was the cross at which they all looked; and he supposed from this that his brother was in danger. For his simple soul this was enough. He seemed to be in a dreadful dream. He cried and trembled, sobbing, while they spoke, like the child he was. But his mind was made up. He would be cut to pieces, but he would never let Frank's name pass his lips. Hence, when one of the Edgingtons, who had met Master Matthew Hopkins, the great witch-finder, and would fain have probed the matter further with such skill as he fancied he had acquired, adjured him solemnly to speak and say where he got the cross, the child was silent; so obstinately silent that it was plain he could have told something if he would. "He is mute of malice," Simon said. "He is mute of the devil!" Luke answered fiercely. "What need of talk when we saw him with our own eyes rule the storm? And it rains still. It rains, and will 'rain,' until his power is broken." This monstrous idea seemed to his hearers in no way incredible. The belief in witchcraft and in demoniacal possession of every kind had reached its height in England about this time, when men's minds, released from the wholesome leading-strings of custom and the church, evinced a natural proneness to run into all manner of extremes. Had the child been a woman, his fate had been sealed on the spot, the popular fancy attributing the black art to that sex in particular. But the fact that he was a boy was so far abnormal, that it stuck in the throat of the Edgington who had spoken before. "Has he any mark upon him?" he asked. [Illustration: He is mute of malice.--Page 156.] The woman replied, almost in a whisper, that he had a black mole on his left shoulder. "Is it a common mark?" She shook her head without speaking. Luke waited for no more. "This is folly!" he cried wildly. "What need have we of signs? We have seen. Bolts and bars will not hold him, nor will water receive him."