"I will get you a better necklace," he told her. "Nothing very fine, or what would the Squire think? I have been collecting choice bits of serpentine, and had them cut out and polished, and you shall have a necklace of them--the stones of your own country. Your throat will warm them, my Sophie, as it would warm my hands if they were cold in death." "Death!" murmured Sophie, shuddering again, "we should not speak of it, lest it hear us." "Then we will talk of love instead--of our love, Sophie." "Alas, that way too lies sorrow! Lucius, what is the end to be? My father would kill me if he knew." "Does he hate me so?" She nodded, with the look of dumb fear in her eyes that thought of the Squire always brought there. "Dear heart, we will change his hate to love. There is a way--if you will trust me and obey me." A tremor of exquisite delight thrilled through her at the words. She had no arts of allurement, no strength of will to make her play the coquette with him, and she was unable, for the purpose of leading him on and tantalizing him to fresh excitement, to deny herself the joy of being his slave. "Obey you!" she said, slipping a little lower on her rock so that her back-tilted head lay against his knee as she looked up at him, "I am yours for you to do with as you will." Stooping, he kissed the swelling curve of her throat, and privately marvelled at her for being such a fool. "Sweetheart," he began softly, "we will call in the aid of higher powers than our own. You know my mother was a Scotswoman, and she had the second sight, like your old Madgy Figgy of the Men-an-tol. She was learned in all kinds of charms, too. Well I remember as a child seeing her staunch the flow of blood from an old servant by crossing two charmed sticks from the hearth over him and saying a charm." "It was Madgy Figgy who told about my ladder," Sophie said, "she has many charms, I know. She carries the water from St. Annan's spring to the church whenever there's to be a christening. No one baptized in water from St. Annan's spring can die by hanging, every one knows that. Was your mother as learned in charms as old Madgy?" "She was a wise woman in more than mere charms, yet we will not slight her knowledge of them, since through that we will win your father's affection for me." "If it could be!" cried Sophie. "It can be. Listen, my sweet. My dear mother, in dying, left me, among books of the craft of healing and suchlike things, an old love-charm she had had from a Wise Woman in the Highlands. It is nothing but a little white powder, yet it affects the very heart-strings of him who takes it." "Could it turn my father's heart towards you? Lucius, how happy we should all be. . . . But surely it might make him love some one else instead--Mr. Le Petyt, perhaps?" "You should know better than that, my foolish Sophie. These things all depend on the intention of he who gives them. You have but to concentrate on me while you give it him, and all will be well."