There was only one living person who had seen his departure. Margeret Bardwell—Margeret Radpath she was no longer—had been up and stirring at dawn of this first day of her married life. Through her kitchen window, she had seen the little shoemaker’s bent figure go up the path, his shoulders bowed by the burden upon his back. Something in his quick, stealthy movements made her realise that it was not a simple errand that had brought him forth so early, but that this was flight from Hopewell—perhaps forever. Was he really going, and the shadow of his ill-will to be taken from her life for all time? She felt a great lightening of the heart and then, a moment after, a sudden haunting, disturbing memory. It was only because his bent, black figure reminded her of another that, so long ago, she had watched go up the same path and vanish over the hill. For a fleeting second, as she watched Samuel Skerry go, there came back a clutching remembrance of Jeremiah Macrae and there rang in her ears that ominous prophecy concerning Master Simon’s garden: “Fire and sword shall waste this place, blood shall be spilled upon its soil, and those who come after you shall walk, mourning, among its desolate paths.” But the memory passed as quickly as it came, and, with a long sigh of relief, she saw the crooked little figure disappear at the turn of the lane. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PART II STEPHEN CHAPTER VIII A TALE OF WITCHES Master Simon’s farseeing eyes had certainly discerned the truth when he said that a garden only came to its own when tended by the children’s children of the man who planted it. Fair as were the flowers and shrubs in his own time, they grew steadily more beautiful as the years passed, until people of Hopewell would always bring their visitors from afar to see such glories of leaf and blossom. Long after Master Simon had slipped away to walk in the brighter garden of Paradise, long after the place belonged to Margeret and then to her children, the villagers would still speak of it as Master Simon’s Garden.