Another hour passed. The bees droned on, the smell of the garden came in upon the breeze. Not a voice reached her from the hamlet. Silence prevailed save for the murmur of the insects, the vague rustling of the leaves, the steady, mocking tick of the old clock against the wall. The woods rolled up before her, their green splendor heightened by the blaze of the June sunlight. The very calm of the place seemed to intensify the passionate despair in her own heart. Suddenly some new sound drifted to Bess’s ears. She twisted forward in the chair, straining at the cords. Some one was moving towards the cottage; Bess heard the rustle of feet in the long grass. Was it Dan returning, or old Isaac with those pistols in his belt? The footsteps stopped at the garden-gate. Bess could see neither the gate nor the path from where she sat. The latch lifted; some one was coming up the brick-paved path. She heard the sound of breathing, the sound of a hand trying the locked door. For a moment silence held. Then with the rustling of clothes against the wall of the cottage a round-backed figure showed blurred by the sunlight at the window, a hook-nosed face looked in at Bess through the open lattice. It was Ursula. Bess, leaning forward in the chair, stared at the old woman with a swift flooding of blood into her face. “Is that you, mother?” Instinctively she had chosen the word that she had used to Ursula when she was a child. There was a husky and vibrating wistfulness in the voice that seemed to carry strange and simple pathos. Ursula was standing at the window, wringing her hands together. For two hours past she had been the creature of indecision, halting between fear of Isaac and great dread of the hints that the old man had cast into her ears. “Mother!” Ursula began to whimper as she looked in at the girl, the impotence of her dotage showing in her face. “What!—they have bound ye to the chair?” “I can’t stir, mother.” “Oh, dear Lord! what shall I do?” “Are we alone?” “They be all away save Solomon,” she answered. Bess’s face strained painfully towards the window. “Where is Solomon?” she asked. Ursula still twisted her hands together and peered round her suspiciously. “Chopping firewood in his shed. I slipped round through the trees. Lord o’ mercy, what’s to be done—what’s to be done!” Bess’s strength of purpose increased with Ursula’s indecision. “Mother,” she said, in a whisper. “Ay, child.” “Ye’ve always been kind to me. Will ye let them bury me in the forest with a bullet in my heart?” Ursula began to sway to and fro, pressing her hands to her bosom, whimpering and muttering like one demented. “Why did ye meddle, Bess—why did ye meddle?” “Isaac wanted to shoot me by the Monk’s Grave.” “He be a fierce man, be Isaac.” “Dan stood for me then; he’ll not stand for me again. Isaac will shoot me; I’ve seen death in his eyes.”