Joyce flung herself in the road beside Herring. All the rage and roughness went out of her instantly. She felt him, to find if his bones were broken. Then she drew him up and laid his head in her bosom, and listened for his breath. ’My maister! my dear, dear maister!’ she cried, between fear and tears. ’My darling, my darling maister! speak now, speak, do’y?’ She rocked herself from side to side, moaning, swaying his head in her arms. ’Oh, maister, maister! what can I do?’ She put her mouth to his, and breathed into his lungs the contents of her own. ’I’ll give’y all the life that be in me, and welcome, if only I can make thee open your eyes again. You must not die. Speak, and let me know that you hear me. It be Joyce, your own poor Joyce, that has’y, and is a rocking of’y, and calling of’y to wake up. Maister, darling maister, do’y hear me? None shall touch you but me. I’ll die afore I lets another near’y.’ Then her tears broke forth; she felt her utter helplessness. ’They’ll be coming for to take’y away, but they shall not do it.’ She laid him back in the road, then stood up, removed the gate, and put it in its place; and then lifting Herring, she partly carried, partly drew him away, through the gate-opening into the wood; there she could hide both him and herself. She took him again in her arms, and swayed herself to and fro, moaning and then breaking into snatches of song. In the wood she resolved she would remain; no one should take him from her. If he were dead, there he should lie, dead, in her arms, on her lap, and she would sit over him watching and waiting patiently till she died also, and the leaves came down—copper-gold off the beech, and russet-brown off the oak—and buried them together. But no! no!—he must not die! What could she do for him? He had known exactly what was right to do for her when ’she were all a broked in pieces.’ He had known how to mend her, so that now she was well and strong again. But then he was a ’skollard’ and she—she was but a poor ignorant savage. What should she do? Go to a cottage and ask that he might be taken in there? Her heart shrank from this. She could not breathe in a house. There, others would surround him, and she would be thrust out. No! she would nurse him there, under the sky and the green trees, where the wind blew, and the grass sprang up, and the birds sang. All at once a thought struck her. In her sense of loneliness, helplessness, misery, an unutterable yearning came over her for some help that she could not define, not even understand. It was a vague effort of the poor dumb soul within to articulate a cry for help to—she knew not whom. She threw herself on her knees beside the body, and stretched her arms from which depended the wretched rags torn to shreds, upwards towards the sky, and raised her face, quivering with agony, and cried hoarsely, again and again—’Our Vaither—kinkum-kum—kinkum-kum! Glory rallaluley!’