But nothing answered, till, in the sudden silence that had fallen as those beastly cries ceased, her own voice echoed back to her from the wooded hillside. “Heriot, Heriot--Heriot!” it mocked, thin and clear; and died away. With a sob that choked her, Andria remembered that to call the old man she must croon like Beryl had done, and she could not remember the weird tune, or sing it if she could. “Stay here,” she said. “I must go to them.” But Salome’s heart was white. “Might as well die as be scared to death,” she answered, with chattering teeth, and, with her arms round the swaying figure of her mistress, she walked on--to death, for all she knew. “Mr. Heriot!” Andria called again, as they reached the outlying fringes of the impenetrable scrub. The old man’s name--if he had one--she did not know. But as she thought it, he stood before her, come out of the bushes as if by magic. Salome groaned as only a black person can. But Andria saw the man’s face, and, for the first time, there was no fleering mockery in it. In the low sunlight he looked not the madman she had fought with in the night, but an old, miserable creature, wizened and bowed, and clothed in rags that were strangely clean. And yet she recoiled involuntarily against Salome as he ran to her, bent forward in the old way, so that his lean, knotted hands almost touched the ground. To her utter amazement, he fell at her feet and kissed the hem of her gown. The next minute he stood up and began to talk very slowly in Spanish. What he said she could not tell, but she knew it was a string of questions. She touched her own breast with a quivering finger, then Salome pointed, as his wild eyes met hers, with utter despair, to the sea. He understood her, for his face grew fierce, and his cry of mad rage turned her cold. To her ears, he seemed once more to be jabbering at her, but, to her wild surprise, Salome answered him. Salome, an ignorant black woman, a minute ago palsied with fright, had gone boldly to his side, and was talking swiftly enough in a strange bastard Spanish. The old creature hid his face in his hands with a pitiful, smothered cry as he heard. Then he turned to Andria with what--if she had known it--were miserable wails for pardon, wretched gratitude that she had at least tried to save the girl whom his crazed brain still took for another. Salome, the respectful, shook Andria as if she had been a child. “Missus, he won’t hurt us! I told him all we knows, and he say to come to his place in de woods. Mr. Heriot dere wid him. And he say his cats is tame, ’cept when he makes dem hunt. You hear him call out when I say master’s dead? He say: ‘De vengeance o’ God!’ Just dat, over and over. Missus, de black work dat I knows been here ain’t nothin’ to what’s been done to dis poor ole man!” “Why is Mr. Heriot in the woods?” cried Andria. “Ask him.”