“Hands off, you coward,” said the old hag. “Why do you not do your own dirty work? Andrew was worth half a dozen of you. Pah, you devil’s spawn! If you touch me I’ll burn your entrails with fire, day and night, and send you shrieking and praying for your own death. But I tell you, that skelpie may not have to die by water. There are other ways of dying than being drowned. I cannot read all the future, but you mark my word, and I have never been wrong yet, she will be gone by the time I named. Little Joan will go as I said; and if we are safely rid of one you need not fear for the other. The stars in their courses fight on our side,” and she laughed an evil laugh. “There is no room in this world for your weak-minded gentle creatures, bah! cowards, worms, with their snivelling pity. Does nature feel pity when the field mouse is killed by the hawk? Does nature feel pity when a mother dies of the plague? Does God feel pity when we starve a child or beat it to death? Let him show his pity for the victims of disease, for the beings he has brought into the world, humpbacked, blind, halt, imbecile, ha! ha! ha! No, the forces on our side are the stronger, and the innocent, the gentle and loving must go. I hate innocence, I hate love; and hate will triumph in the end. “Do you think I love _you_, you coward?” and she advanced slowly as though to clutch his throat with her skinny hand, laughing her demoniacal laugh. “You are on our side, but you are a worm;--Thomas, I spit at you, begone.” Thomas looked at her in terror and slunk away till the old woman’s mocking laughter grew fainter. “Faugh! she was mad--mad--what did it matter? And yet, suppose she took it into her head to put a spell on him, the same as she had done on little Joan! What then? But he would be even with Aline yet; Andrew was a clumsy bungler, he would see if he could not secure a more efficient agent.” Thomas had allowed his imagination to dwell round his grievance against Aline until it had grown to colossal dimensions. She could not even smile on any one without him reckoning it up against her as an offence. The thing was becoming an obsession with him. But what did the old crone mean? Something certainly was going to happen; did it involve Thomas, or was he himself to be unaffected by the play of forces? The feeling was unpleasant and he could not shake it off. After meeting Thomas, Aline had gone on to Peter’s cottage. She found that the dying child was weaker than ever, but she still seemed to cling tenaciously to life. She raised herself a little when Aline came in and her eyes shone with an unnatural brightness. “I shall never see you any more, Aline,” she said. “And I have several things that I want to say to you. They are going to take me away. I know they mean to be kind, yet I would rather have died quietly here. But listen, it is not about that that I want to talk,” the child went on excitedly.