"I suppose your Honour means belling the cat?" said the blacksmith, adding with a rueful laugh, "I can't imagine a nastier job. She's a cat with claws." As they walked up to the house, the labourer whispered to Hazel, "Please, missy, does it mean that the mistress killed her husband? They always say so in the village, but...." "Don't, Ben; don't! I can't bear talking about it," cried Hazel with a shudder. And when they reached the house, she ran up to her own bedroom and locked herself in. Ben was despatched to get a stout coil of rope, and Master Nathaniel and the blacksmith, whom the recent excitement had made hungry, began to forage around for something to eat. Suddenly a voice at the door said, "And what, may I ask, are you looking for in my larder, gentlemen?" It was the widow. First she scrutinized Master Nathaniel--a little pale and hollow-eyed, perhaps, but alive and kicking, for all that. Then her eyes travelled to Peter Pease. At that moment, Ben entered with the rope, and Master Nathaniel nudged the law-man, who, clearing his throat, cried in the expressionless falsetto of the Law, "Clementina Gibberty! In the name of the country of Dorimare, and to the end that the dead, the living, and those not yet born, may rest quietly in their graves, their bed, and the womb, I arrest you for the murder of your late husband, Jeremiah Gibberty." She turned deadly pale, and, for a few seconds, stood glaring at him in deadly silence. Then she gave a scornful laugh. "What new joke of yours is this, Peter Pease? I was accused of this before, as you know well, and acquitted with the judge's compliments, and as good as an apology. Law business must be very slack in Swan that you've nothing better to do than to come and frighten a poor woman in her own house with old spiteful tales that were silenced once and for all nearly forty years ago. My late husband died quietly in his bed, and I only hope you may have as peaceful an end. And you must know very little of the law, Peter Pease, if you don't know that a person can't be tried twice for the same crime." Then Master Nathaniel stepped forward. "You were tried before," he said quietly, "for poisoning your husband with the sap of osiers. This time it will be for poisoning him with the berries of merciful death. Tonight the dead have found their tongues." She gave a wild shriek, which reached upstairs to Hazel's room and caused her to spring into bed and pull the blankets over her ears, as if it had been a thunderstorm. Master Nathaniel signed to Ben, who, grinning from ear to ear, as is the way of rustics when witnessing a painful and embarrassing scene, came up to his mistress with the coil of rope. But to bind her, he needed the aid of both the blacksmith and Master Nathaniel, for, like a veritable wild cat, she struggled and scratched and bit. When her arms were tightly bound, Master Nathaniel said, "And now I will read you the words of the dead."