The speaker was Mrs. Bell: who had at last assumed the widow's dress and cap. Her audience consisted of her daughter Rosaline, the Aunt Pellet from Falmouth, Blase Pellet, and two or three neighbours. The aunt and Rosaline had arrived from Falmouth to attend the funeral. Rosaline, at first, had absolutely refused to come; she "felt afraid," she said, with much trembling and many bitter tears; she did not like to look upon the dead, even though it was her poor father: and she also felt too ill to travel. But John Pellet and his wife overruled these objections. They told her it was an "unnatural state of feeling;" one that might not be indulged: and the aunt, who was coming to Trennach herself, brought Rosaline with her, partly by persuasion, partly by force. Her plea of illness might indeed have been allowed. Thin, white, worn, with a manner that seemed to be for ever starting at shadows, Rosaline looked little like the gay and blooming girl once known to Trennach. Trennach gazed at her with amazed eyes, wondering what Falmouth could have done to her in that short period, or whether the Seven Whistlers, which had so startled her at home, could have followed her to that populous town. Sitting in her mother's kitchen, her back to the light, her cheek resting on her hand, Rosaline listened in silence to the conversation, two of the company especially regarding her--Blase Pellet and Nancy Tomson. Nancy openly avowed that she had never seen any young woman so changed in her life; while Blase Pellet, though mentally acknowledging the change, was taking in draughts of her wondrous beauty. "No living body of men have queerer fancies than miners, especially these Cornish miners: and poor Josiah, though he was not Cornish at all, as we know, had his," pursued Dame Bell, chiefly addressing her sister, a tall, thin woman, who had arrived fashionably attired in crape and bombazine, with a veil to her bonnet. Not that she wore her bonnet now, for this was the next morning, and the day of the funeral. "Hardly a man about here would venture close up to that shaft at night: and if you go out and ask them one by one, Sarah, you'll find I am telling you nothing but truth," pursued the widow. "Since Dan Sandon threw himself headlong in, and was killed, the men won't go near it for fear of seeing him. Neither would Bell; and----" "Perhaps he fell into it accidentally, Ann," interrupted Mrs. Pellet. "I don't say but he might have done so. If he was at the edge of the pit, looking down, or anything of that sort, he might have overbalanced himself. But I do say that he was not there alone. I ask what took him there at all; and I ask who was with him?" Pertinent questions. Rosaline, chancing to look up, met the gaze of Blase Pellet. Each started slightly, and dropped their eyes, as though to look at one another were a crime.