Midnight; and the hour of twelve rang out, overcoming for a brief while the ceaseless chattering of the beck. Mistress Lynn put away her money-bags, and relocked the bridewain. She bent her head, listening intently, but to a clock striking twelve far back in her memory. On such a night as this, at the same hour, she had hidden Joel Hart among the wool-sacks, while David Lynn, goodman, slept peacefully in his bed. That night summed up for Annas all the sweetness and bitterness of life. She had lived then to the utmost fibre of her being. She drew the curtains and lay down. The four-poster once more took on its likeness to a ship in full sail. But there was no rest for the old woman. She spent the night-time, as she had foretold to her great-granddaughter, thinking of the days gone by. During those cold, early hours, that drag so wearily for the wakeful, she lived again through many a wild scene. Yet she longed for sleep, and vainly tried to put the memories from her, which she would rather cast into oblivion for ever. Hers had been an eventful life. She had been born and bred in this land of the dales and fells, under the shadow of Thundergay. Her looks and actions showed the blood from whence she came. She was a true descendant of those wild Northmen, who had once swooped down upon that countryside, and built their homesteads there. Tall, blue-eyed, and yellow-haired in her youth, she might have been Unn, the Deep-minded, come to life again out of her saga. About her breathed an air of mystery, for she was, in truth, no common woman, either in body or in mind. She had married early, and made this farm of Greystones the very centre of her own personality. Husband and children had feared rather than loved her, and no one knew what depths of affection her nature held, save Joel Hart, dead seventy years ago. There was a Joel Hart now living at Forest Hall, the old house about a mile away down the dale, and upon him had fallen a pale reflection of her love. He and Barbara were the only beings for whom she felt any real regard, and this not for their own sakes, but because the one bore so striking a resemblance to his ill-fated ancestor and the other to herself. They were a reincarnation, in appearance, of the past. As Mistress Lynn lay awake, she became acutely conscious of those other days. They lived again. At one moment she was helping to bar the doors against the last raid of the moss-troopers, while her husband shot at them with a flint-lock from an upper window. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, she was standing among the wool-sacks, her lantern making a round moon of light upon the wall opposite. Even yet she could not see a lantern's glow without the blood quickening through her veins.