"Whereabouts did ye hear they Whistlers, Rosaline?" she asked at length. But there was no answer. "On the Bare Plain, I take it," resumed the woman. "Were't a-nigh they mounds by the Shaaft? Sounds echoes in they zigzag paths rarely. I've heard the wind a-whistling like anything there afore now. She be a pewerly lonesome consarn, thaat Shaaft, for waun who has to paas her at night alone." A moan, telling of the sharpest mental agony, broke from Rosaline. Dame Bell heard it as she was coming in. In the midst of her sympathy, it angered her. "Rosaline, I won't have this. There's reason in roasting of eggs. We shall have your father here directly, and what will he say? I can tell you, he was bad enough when he went out. Come! just rouse yourself." "Father heard the Whistlers, and--they--bode--death!" shivered Rosaline. "They don't bode yours, I say," repeated Dame Bell, losing patience. "Do you suppose death comes to every person who hears the Whistlers?--or ill-luck either?" "No, no," assented Nancy Tomson, for Rosaline did not speak. "For waun that faals into ill-luck after hearing they Whistlers, ten escapes. I've knowed a whole crowd o' they men hear the sounds, and nought heve come on't to any waun on 'em." "And that's quite true," said Mrs. Bell. Rosaline could not be persuaded to try the soup. It was impossible that she could swallow it, she said. Taking a candle; she went up to her room; to bed, as her mother supposed. "And the best place for her," remarked Dame Bell. "To think of her getting a fright like this!" But poor Rosaline did not go to bed, and did not undress. Taking her shoes off, that she might not be heard, she began to pace the few yards of her narrow chamber, to and fro, to and fro, from wall to wall, in an anguish the like of which has rarely been felt on earth. She was living over again the night's meeting at the Bottomless Shaft and its frightful ending: she saw the white, upturned, agonized face, and heard the awful cry of despair of him who was falling into its pitiless depths, and was now lying there, dead: and it seemed to her that she, herself, must die of it. The clock struck ten, and Nancy Tomson tore herself away from the warm and hospitable kitchen, after regaling herself upon the soup rejected by Rosaline. And Dame Bell sat on, knitting, and waiting for her husband. When Rosaline, her hands lifted in distress, tore away that evening from the Bottomless Shaft, and the tragedy that had been enacted there, and went flying over the Bare Plain towards home, Frank Raynor, recovering from the horror which had well-nigh stunned his faculties, went after her. Two or three times he attempted to say a word to her, but she took no notice of him; only sped the quicker, if that were possible. She never answered; it was as if she did not hear. When they reached the narrow path that branched off to the cottages, there she stopped, and turned towards him. "We part here. Part for ever.