The girl had been content these years to let these vague memories glide away into oblivion. Now and again they would rise up to haunt her with strange vividness, frail ghostly images of other days. How was it that she often saw a negro man with black, woolly hair in her dreams, she who had never seen such a man in Pevensel? Then there was that memory of her falling and cutting her bare knee upon a stone, and of a tall lady with bright eyes and a brooch with green stones at her throat running to catch her in her arms. Vaguely, too, she believed that she had once been in a great ship at sea. There were incidents that lived more vividly than the rest in her mind; one, the memory of her standing at night on the deck of a ship with the dark sails flapping above and rough men swearing and quarrelling about her; she had seen blows given, heard a wild cry and the plash of a body thrown over the bulwarks into the sea. Then again she remembered being taken in a boat by night to land; the same rough men were with her; she could still recall one who wore a great pig-tail and had a black patch over one eye and a cloven lip. They had come with her to the shore and taken her into the woods, carrying bales that had seemed wondrous heavy. Thence they had disappeared, and the life in Pevensel had begun, its very beginnings dim as the mysterious past. These memories came back with strange vividness to her mind that morning after her parting with Jeffray on the heath. For the first time in her life she found herself wondering whether old Ursula had told her the truth. Could she have dreamed these mind pictures that still clung to her? Were these memories but the dim and fantastic fancies of childhood, mere myths begotten of a child’s brain. She puzzled over them earnestly as she walked through the woods that morning, and promised herself that she would tell them to Richard Jeffray when they should meet again. Old Ursula sat up after Bess had gone to bed that night, huddled snugly in the ingle-nook with her black cat at her side. The pewter glistened on the shelves as the handful of sticks that the dame had thrown on the sulky fire kindled and broke into busy flame. Bess had been in bed half an hour or more, and was lying with her black hair loose upon the pillow, thinking of Richard Jeffray and her adventure with him. She had primed the pistols from the powder-horn kept in the kitchen-press, and had hidden them away in the cupboard in her bedroom, meaning to carry one whenever she went abroad in the woods. Bess had fallen asleep, when old Ursula, dozing in the ingle-nook, was awakened by a knocking at the cottage door. She started up, hobbled across the kitchen, and let Isaac Grimshaw in. The old man sat himself down on the settle before the fire, drew out a short pipe and a tobacco-box, and began to smoke. He looked at Ursula with his shrewd, calculating eyes, jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and smiled. “The wench is above, eh?” “This hour or more.”