Hester waited for no further instruction. She caught up her fawn-coloured Quaker shawl and grey bonnet, and was off, putting them on as she ran. Anna, sobbing wildly, turned and hid her face on Jane, as one who wants to be comforted. Then, her mood changing, she threw herself down beside Patience, the tears from her own eyes falling on Patience's face. "Patience, dear Patience, canst thee forgive me? I have been wilful and naughty, but I never meant to cross thee really. I did it only to tease thee; but I loved thee all the while." Patience, suffering as she was, drew down the repentant face to kiss it fervently. "I know it, dear child; I know thee. Don't thee distress thyself for me." Mr. Parry came, and Patience was carried into the spare room. Her leg was broken, and badly broken; the surgeon called it a compound fracture. So there was an end to the grand cleansing scheme for a long time to come! Patience lay in sickness and pain, and Hester had to make her her first care. Anna's spirits revived in a day or two. Mr. Parry said a cure would be effected in time; that the worst of the business was the long confinement for Patience; and Anna forgot her dutiful fit of repentance. Patience _would_ be well again, would be about as before; and, as to the present confinement, Anna rather grew to look upon it as the interposition of some good fairy, who must have taken her own liberty under its special protection. Whether Anna would have succeeded in eluding the vigilance of Patience _up_ cannot be told; she certainly did that of Patience _down_. Anna had told Herbert Dare that he was not to pay a visit to Atterly's field again, or expect her to pay one; but Herbert Dare was about the last person to obey such advice. Had William Halliburton remained to be--as Herbert termed it--a treacherous spy, there's no doubt that Herbert would have striven to set his vigilance at defiance: with William's absence, the field, both literally and figuratively, was open to him. In the absence of Samuel Lynn, it was doubly open. Herbert Dare knew perfectly well that if the Quaker once gained the slightest inkling of his secret acquaintance with Anna, it would effectually be put a stop to. To wear a cloak resembling William Halliburton's, on his visits to the field, had been the result of a bright idea. It had suddenly occurred to Mr. Herbert that if the Quaker's lynx eyes did by mischance catch sight of the cloak, promenading some fine night at the back of his residence, they would accord it no particular notice, concluding the wearer to be William Halliburton taking a moonlight stroll at the back of _his_ residence. Nevertheless, Herbert had timed his visits so as to make pretty sure that Samuel Lynn was out of view, safely ensconced in Mr. Ashley's manufactory; and he had generally succeeded. Not quite always, as the reader knows.