“Yes, I suppose it will soon be quite an old affair,” she said, with a sigh. “And is Miss Hardacre very handsome?” “A matter of opinion, my dear.” “Mr. Jeffray is very much in love with her?” Miss Sugg’s mouth tightened primly. “It is not my business,” she said, quietly, “to inquire into the warmth and nature of a gentleman’s affections.” Poor Bess, her forecastings of the future were greatly changed by those few words of Mary Sugg’s. She woke no longer in the morning with a rush of joy to hear the thrushes singing in the parsonage garden. All her quaint imaginings were past and gone, for she was woman enough to feel the significance of this new truth. A kind of hopelessness took possession of her, a conviction that Jeffray had given her nothing but pity, and that all her dreams had been made of mist. Miss Hardacre was a great lady, and of course Mr. Jeffray was right in wishing to marry her. Bess went about her work with a dull ache at her heart. She no longer dreamed of the day when she should see Jeffray face to face again; rather, she dreaded the very thought of it, and grew full of a bitter humbleness that softened her whole nature. Her one yearning was to be saved from Dan and Isaac, to be left in peace awhile, unquestioned and alone. It was the seventh evening of Bess’s sojourn at the parsonage. Dr. Sugg had gone down into the village to visit certain of the villagers who were sick to death of the fever, and Miss Sugg was sitting in her bedroom, sewing. Bess had been sweeping the kitchen and polishing the pewter and the plate. The evening was full of the splendor of spring, birds singing in every tree, and the sky a great sheet of gold in the west. The garden looked so green and fair with the sunlight shimmering through upon the grass, and daffodils asleep in the shade, that Bess had opened the garden door and looked up at the blue zenith and the golden west. The broad beds would soon be ablaze with tulips, red and white. Anemones and primroses were flowering in the shrubbery, and the gorse on the heath above Rodenham was gilding the purple of the hills. Halting suddenly as she crossed the grass, she fancied that she caught the sound of footsteps close by in the church-yard. The stone-wall that divided the burial-ground, with its gray headstones and its yews, from the parsonage garden, stood some seven feet high, and was tufted along the summit with gilliflower and grass. Bess ran her eyes suspiciously along the edge that cut the gold of the western sky. Suddenly, just above her, she saw a pair of hairy hands come over the wall, the fingers clawing at the stone-work to gain a surer hold. A fur cap jerked up above the wall; a face followed it, the mouth agape, the eyes straining right and left into the dusk.