"Oh, so you're the young party as drowned herself, are you? Well, they're gone anyways, and the little chit with them, and there's no saying where. You may believe me. Ask the neighbors else." The young woman leaned against the door-jamb with a white face and great eyes. "Well, well, how hard she takes it. Deary me, deary me, she's not a bad sort, after all. Well, well, who'd ha' thought it! There, there, come in and sit awhile. It is cruel to lose one's babby--and me to tell her, too. Misbegotten or not, it's one's own flesh and blood, and that's what I always says." The young woman had been drawn into the house and seated on a chair. She got up again with the face of an old woman. "Oh, I'm choking!" she said. "Rest awhile, do now, my dear--there--there." "No, no, my good woman, let me go." "Heaven help you, child; how you look!" "Heaven has never helped me," said the young woman. "I was a Sister of Charity only two years ago. A man found me and wooed me; married me and abandoned me; I tried to die and they rescued me; they separated me from my child and put me in an asylum; I escaped, and have now come for my darling, and he is gone." "Deary me, deary me!" and the old woman stroked her consolingly. "Let me go," she cried, starting up afresh. "If Heaven has done nothing for me, perhaps the world itself will have mercy." The ghastly face answered ill to the grating laugh that followed as she jerked her head aside and hurried away. CHAPTER I. IN THE YEAR 1875. It was Young Folks' Day in the Vale of Newlands. The summer was at its height; the sun shone brightly; the lake to the north lay flat as a floor of glass, and reflected a continent of blue cloud; the fells were clear to their summits, and purple with waves of heather. It was noontide, and the shadows were short. In the slumberous atmosphere the bees droned, and the hot air quivered some feet above the long, lush grass. The fragrance of new-mown hay floated languidly through a sub-current of wild rose and honeysuckle. In a meadow at the foot of the Causey Pike tents were pitched, flags were flying, and crowds of men, women, and children watched the mountain sports. In the center of a group of spectators two men, stripped to the waist, were wrestling. They were huge fellows, with muscles that stood out on their arms like giant bulbs, and feet that held the ground like the hoofs of oxen. The wrestlers were calm to all outward appearance, and embraced each other with the quiet fondling of lambs and the sinuous power of less affectionate creatures. But the people about them were wildly excited. They stopped to watch every wary movement of the foot, and craned their necks to catch the subtlest twist of the wrist. "Sista, Reuben, sista! He'll have enough to do to tummel John Proudfoot. John's up to the scat to-day, anyways." "Look tha! John's on for giving him the cross-buttock." John was the blacksmith, a big buirdly fellow with a larger blunt head.