“At first I was stunned,” she said. “He may have been killed at once, for no sound reached me. Then all at once the wicked spirit put it into my head that here, by doing nothing, was a sure way out of my difficulties--was safety from that impish slanderer, was the bar removed to my favour in the eyes of one who had confided to me his detestation of children.” Ned sprang back, almost striking at the crouching figure. “Not me!” he raged; “I will have no responsibility--not any, for the inhuman deed, thrust upon me! And so you left him to his fate, and went home and ate and drank, feeding your beastly lusts and desires, while he--oh, devil, devil!” She scrambled to her feet and made as if she would run from this new terror of a hate more ghastly than all she had suffered hitherto. “Don’t kill me!” she whimpered. “Did you not tell me you hated children? and you said they could not feel as we do.” He glared at her like a maniac. “You left him; what is the need to say more?” “I did not,” she moaned, wringing her hands as if to cleanse them of blood; “I came again on the third day, and I called to him, I prayed to him, but he never cried back one word. Then I thought, Perhaps he has climbed out and fled away.” “Liar! you are a liar! Why, then, did you seek to hide your crime by a blasphemous lie?” “I have suffered,” she answered only, like one before the judgment-seat. He mastered himself by a wrenching effort. He stood aside, peremptorily motioning her to pass on her way. Not a word would he speak. She went forward a few steps--a numb, haggard spectre of beauty, a soul paralysed under the immediate terror of its sentence. Suddenly she turned upon him, awful in the last expression of despair. “They will tear me to pieces when they know!” “Let your Virgin protect you,” he said. Without another word she left him, going off amongst the trees. The sunbeams, peering through the leaves, touched and fled from contact with her; woodland things scurried from her path; the cleansing rain, even, stringing the branches, withheld itself from falling till she had gone. Something that he drove under forcibly struggled to rise and give voice from the watcher’s heart. She looked so small, so pitifully frail and small a vessel to carry that great load of sin. The next moment she disappeared from his sight. He turned, with a groan, to scrutinise the horror. It was yet so far undecayed as that he was able, for all his little memory of the living child, to identify the poor remains. But, for a certain reason, he would compel himself to a nauseous task--even to touch the thing if necessary. It was not. There was actual evidence, to his unaccustomed eyes, that the boy’s neck had been dislocated by the fall. He moved away, giving out a sigh of fearful relief. At least he would not be haunted by that anguish. And should he follow and tell her? “No,” he thought sternly--for love makes men cruel; “as she meant, so shall she suffer the worst.”