"We'll see, mother," said Mace, smiling, as taking a cup from a shelf the old woman hurried out of the cottage to where, out in the road by the side of the lane, a dipping-place for the clear, cool iron-impregnated water had been made. Stooping down, after glancing right and left, she dipped the cup full of the clear water; and then, removing the cork from the little phial, she poured half its contents beneath the hand that covered the cup, recorked and hid the bottle, and then with an ugly smile about her lips returned to her visitor. "Here, child," she said; "it be cool, and sweet, and pure. There be no curse in that;" and as she spoke she glanced involuntarily at the curtain, behind which Anne Beckley was listening, and, though no breeze penetrated the cottage, the hangings visibly shook as Mace took the cup. Poison, a decoction of some imaginary power, or merely the juice of a plant full of tannin, the effect was the same. Mother Goodhugh was too deeply intent on watching her last visitor and the curtain to pay any heed to the contents of the cup. She had dipped it full of the iron-impregnated water, and seen that it was clear as crystal before holding it in her left hand, with the fingers extended round the rim and her palm acting as a cover. The pouring in of the liquid of the phial, too, had been done in a hasty way, without more than a glance at what she was doing. To her surprise, then, as she handed the cup to her visitor, Mace passed it back. "I asked you for a cup of cold water, mother," she said quietly, "and you gave me this!" Mother Goodhugh looked down at the cup to see that the limpid crystal water she had dipped had turned of a livid black; and, startled and convicted by the change, she gazed at it, then at the girl, and then back at the cup. "What did you put in it, mother?" said Mace, quietly. "I--I--put anything in?" said the old woman, humbly; "what should I put in?" "Some one or another of your silly mixtures," said Mace, sternly. "Why do you attempt to try them upon me?" "Silly mixtures!" Such a term applied to her philtres in the presence of one whom she wished for her own reasons to impress fully with her potency! A moment before the old woman was shivering and cowed; now her visitor's words roused up the spirit of opposition within her, and, with her eyes flaming defiance, she called upon her powers of well-matured dissimulation as she half shrieked:--