Janet, soon as her cousin was gone, slipped out into the garden—budding with spring leafage, yet cold for all that with memory of the storm just over-past—and sought the lane that led up to the pasture-fields. This wooing of Red Ratcliffe’s was growing irksome to her, backed as it was by the Lean Man’s favour; nor had she guessed till now that any shared the secret of her love for Shameless Wayne. Yet for all her own troubles, she found leisure to think kindly of the mad woman, who had come in such piteous plight to Wildwater and had been turned away by so rude a storm of jests and harshness. Where was Mistress Wayne now, she wondered? Shading her eyes against the sunlight, which was fitful, chill and dazzling, she looked for the frail woman. At first she could see nothing save the bare green of scanty herbage, the swart lines of wall, the dark, straight hollows running up the fields to mark where the plough had once on a time furrowed the hard face of the land. Then she made out a little figure, moving up toward where the topmost field curved nakedly across the steel-blue sky. A great compassion held the girl as she watched Mistress Wayne clamber up the hill and turn at the summit and move along the sky-edge, her frailty showing pitilessly clear against the empty space behind her. The wrath of God held no place in the calculations of the Ratcliffes; but Janet had learned awe of the self-same storm-winds that had taught cruelty to her folk, and she trembled now to think that they had turned a want-wit—one of God’s own people, according to the moorside superstition—into the heart of the pathless and bog-riddled heath. "Come back!" she cried, running up the fields. "Come back! You cannot cross the marshes out beyond there!" Mistress Wayne looked down after the cry had been twice repeated, and stopped a moment; then hurried forward faster than before. Janet quickened pace, fear gaining on her lest the other should be lost to view. The flying figure above moved with a lagging step now, and Janet overtook her at the wall-side which divided moor and field. "You will not take me back, not take me back?" pleaded Mistress Wayne, shrinking close against the wall. "I would see you safe to the lower ground, Mistress. Where would you go?" The kindliness in Janet’s voice wrought a sudden change in Mistress Wayne. She forgot her dread of the eyes which had haunted her throughout the night, and awoke to a keen sense of her present misery. "I will go home," she said—"home to Marsh House. I am faint, and very hungry. They gave me milk and a piece of oaten bread at a farmstead on the moor, but that is a long, long while ago—longer than I could tell you—is the way far to Marsh?"