So she died; for the gathering waters soon beat out her life and silenced her feeble struggle to save it. A short agony ended the nine months of experience through which Joan's life has been followed; her fires were quenched, and that most roughly; her fears, hopes, sorrows, joys were all swept away; and Nature stood defeated by herself, to see a young life strangled on the threshold of motherhood, and an infant being drowned so near to birth that its small heart had already begun to beat. Two men, tramping through the desolation of the ruined valley at Uncle Chirgwin's command, discovered Joan's body. The elder was Amos Bartlett, and he fell back a step at the spectacle with a sorrowful oath on his lip; the younger searcher turned white and showed fear. The dead girl lay on her back, so left by the water. Her dress had been caught between two great bowlders near the pool of her drowning and the flood had thus caused her no injury. "God's goodness! how comed she here!" cried out Bartlett. "Oh, but this'll be black news--black news; an' her brother drowned at sea likewise! Theer's a hidden meanin' in it, I lay, if us awnly knawed." The lad who accompanied Bartlett was shaking, and did not dare to look at the still figure which lay so stiff and straight at their feet. Amos therefore bid him use his legs, hasten to the farm, break the news, and dispatch a couple of men to the coomb. "I can pull up a hurdle an' wattle it with withys meantime," he said; "for 'tis allus well to have work for the hand in such a pass as this. Ban't no good for me to sit an' look at her, poor fond wummon." He busied himself with the hurdle accordingly, and when two of the hands presently came down from Drift they found their burden ready for them. The old, silent man called Gaffer Polglaze found sufficient excitement in the tragedy to loosen a tongue which seldom wagged. He spat on his hands and rubbed them together before seizing his end of the hurdle. Then he spoke: "My stars! to see maaster when he heard! He rolled all about as if he was drunk. An' yet 'tis the bestest thing as could fall 'pon the gal. 'Er was lookin' for the cheel in a month or so, they do say. Poor sawl--so cold as a quilkin [Footnote: _Quilkin_--A frog.] now, and the unborn baaby tu." Then Mr. Bartlett answered: "The unhappy creature was fine an' emperent to me 'bout a matter o' drownin' chets in the spring. Yet here she'm drowned herself sure 'nough. Well, well, God's will be done." "'Tis coorious, to be sure, how bazzomy [Footnote: _Bazzomy_--Blue or livid.] a corpse do get 'bout the faace arter a water death," said the first speaker, regarding the dead with frank interest. "Her eyes do make me wimbly-wambly in the stomach," declared the second laborer; "when you've done talkin', Gaffer Polglaze, us'll go up-long, an' the sooner the better." "Butivul eyes, tu, they was--wance. Sky-color an' no less. What I'm wonderin' is as to however she comed here 'tall."