"I think, Johnny," said the mother to me, "that we had better stop Miss Barbary's coming to-morrow; Mr. Duffham does not know but the malady may be getting infectious. Suppose you go now to the cottage and tell her." So I went off to do so, and found her ill. On this same Friday afternoon, having occasion to ask some question of her father, who was in the garden, she found him planting greens on the plot of ground--the _grave_--under the summer-apple tree. Before she could speak, a shudder of terror seized her; she trembled from head to foot, turned back to the kitchen, and sat down on the nearest chair. Old Joan pronounced it to be an attack of ague; Miss Katrine, she said, must have taken a chill. Perhaps she had. It was just then that I arrived and found her shivering in the kitchen. Joan ran up to her room in the garret to bring down some powder she kept there, said to be a grand remedy for ague. It was getting dusk then; the sun had set. To me, Katrine seemed to be shaking with terror, not illness. Mr. Barbary, in full view of the window, was planting the winter greens under the summer-apple tree. "What is it that you are frightened at?" I said, propping my back against the kitchen mantelpiece. "I _must_ ask you a question, Johnny Ludlow," she whispered, panting and shivering. "Was it you who came and stood inside the gate there in the middle of last night?" "Yes it was. And I saw what Mr. Barbary was doing--_there_. I could not make it out." Katrine left her chair and placed herself before me. Clasping her piteous hands, she besought me to be silent; to keep the secret for pity sake--to be _true_. All kinds of odd ideas stole across me. I would not listen to them; only promised her that I would tell nothing, would be true for ever and a day. "It must have been an accident, you know," she pleaded; "it must have been an accident." Joan came back, and I took my departure. What on earth could Katrine have meant? All kinds of fancies were troubling my brain, fit only for what in these later days are called the penny dreadfuls, and I did my best to drive them out of it. The next morning Katrine was really ill. Her throat was parched, her body ached with fever. As to Lena, she was worse; and we, who ought to have gone back to school that day, were kept at home lest we should carry with us any infection. "All right," said Tod. "It's an ill wind that blows nobody good." He did not believe in the infection; told me in private that Duffham was an old woman. Can any one picture, I wonder, Katrine Barbary's distress of mind, the terrible dread that had taken possession of it? Shuddering dread, amounting to a panic: dread of the deed itself, dread for her father, dread of discovery.