"Tha’rt ower tender for this rough world. I allus telled thee so," murmured the little old woman. Soon she was breathing in the sharp, stifled fashion that told the Sexton she was hard asleep. And he, too, began to nod, with softer thoughts than fight to give him company—thoughts of the frail woman who had claimed his hospitality, the little fairy-kist wanton who seemed so full in sympathy with his dreamings. "Good or bad, God keep the little body," he whispered in his sleep. Silence crept shadowy from the corners of the room—the silence, compact of rustling undersounds, that seems full of tragedies half lost yet unforgotten. The little sounds grew big, the big ones thunderous. The eight-day clock on the right hand of the chimney-piece ticked weightily, with grave disregard of everything save Time’s slow passing. Nanny’s harsh breathing crossed her goodman’s softer snore. And now a rat floundered in the rafters overhead; and now the spiders in the walls began their clear and eerie ticking—_tick-tick_, _tick-tick_, like the swinging of an elfin pendulum. Once in a while an owl hooted, or the long-drawn wailing of a peewit sounded from the moor without. The night, in this cottage-kitchen, was endless, ghoulish and unrestful; and the slumbering folk on chair and settle served but to heighten the unrestfulness. Witherlee turned in his sleep, and lifted his eyelids for a moment, and heard the spiders ticking in the wall. "Yond is th’ death-tick," he muttered drowsily. "Lord save us, there’ll be blows afore th’ moon wears old." Again the fret of little sounds fell over the cottage—over the living-room, and over the bed-chamber above where Mistress Wayne was tricking a brief spell of sleep from fate. But her sleep was neither so lasting nor so light as Nanny Witherlee had named it, and dawn was scarce greying over the moor-reaches when she waked. Full of a sense of disaster, confused and rudderless, she rose and went to the window and looked out across the graves. And the dawn was a pitiful thing, that came to touch her sorrows into life. Where was she? And why should the grave stones, set toward the brightening East, show red as blood? She could not tell—only, that some one was waiting to carry her far from these dreadful places of the moor. Someone was waiting for her—that was the one surety she had. But where? She smiled on the sudden, and clapped her slender, blue-veined hands together. "Why, yes," she lisped, "’tis Dick Ratcliffe who waits for me—strange that I cannot see him in the graveyard. We should have met there, he and I." She stopped and knit her little brows. "Dick lives at Wildwater," she went on slowly. "How if I seek him out, and reproach him that he did not wait? Yes, yes, I’ll go to Wildwater—we have far to go to-day, and I must hurry." She picked up her wearing-gear and eyed it questioningly; then donned it quickly, stole down the stair, and stood, finger on lip, regarding the Sexton and his wife.