Tinker's Pool glooms down in the hollow, just beyond the last of the stoups, and the gamekeeper's house stands at the top of the road; between the two lies Sorrowstones Spring--a two-roomed, crumbling cottage that gets its name from the well-spring at the door. Rachel Strangeways, the quarrymaster's grandmother, had lived here time out of mind, and she would have found it hard to chance on a dwelling more to her liking. Rachel was reputed a witch throughout the countryside; maidens came to her, in fear and trembling, to have their fortunes told, and burly farmers sought her aid whenever the Evil Eye was working havoc among their cattle. She dealt in drugs, too, and great virtue was attached to an infusion she prepared of a certain bitter herb which only grew on the marsh that hugged her door. Her eighty-five years had bowed her body to the proportions of a hunchback's, and there was an evil light in her blue-green eyes that did not fit ill with her reputation. Whenever Joe found himself in straits he repaired to the maternal roof-tree, for Mistress Strangeways could show good common sense on occasion. Joe walked over to the cottage on the night following Griff's stay at Peewit House. He entered the living-room without knocking, and found Mistress Strangeways huddled over the embers of a poverty-stricken fire. "Well, mother," said he, "I'm i' a queer way." Rachel gibbered over her ashes awhile, then looked up. Her blue-green eyes grew almost soft as they rested on this scrubby-bearded clown, who was yet bone of her bone. For there had been a time when the old witch's hand was not against the world, nor the world's hand against her; that was in the days when she and her man had a spruce little cottage at the edge of the moor, and a strip of garden where the peonies and the sweet marjoram and the ladslove grew, and one little lass to fend for. The little lass had grown up into a slim, well-favoured maid, and the mother had loved her after the profligate fashion of these rough-speeched, tender-hearted women of the uplands. And Mother Strangeways' heart was broken, once for all, when the girl died in bringing Joe to a shameful birth; she did not rail against her daughter, but against the world that had wronged her, as the way of her class is; and she hardened herself against all men living, and buried her husband in due course, and came to this battered, wind-swept cottage to live out her days. And Joe Strangeways, who had inherited neither his mother's fearlessness nor his father's breeding, was all she had left in the world to cherish and frame plans for. "So tha'rt come to me?" she muttered, still with her eyes on Joe's face. "So tha'rt come to me? Ay, it brings men to their women-folk, does trouble; year in an' year out, I niver see thy black face, Joe, without there's trouble agate. Sit thee dahn, lad; sit thee dahn, and let's know what's toward."