Do you remember her, reader? Well, if you do, that brings us to the point I sought to reach in the dull flat expanse of the far past; and we can stand and look around us for awhile. That old woman was not one easily to forget or lightly to yield her resentments. There was something perdurable in them as well as in her gaunt, sinewy frame. As she stood there menacing him, she wanted but three years of seventy. She had battled too with many a storm--wind and weather, suffering and persecution, sorrow and privation, had beat upon her hard--very hard. They had but served to stiffen and wither and harden, however. Her corporeal frame, shattered as it seemed, was destined to outlive many of the young and fair spirit-tabernacles around it--to pass over, by long years, the ordinary allotted space of human life; and it seemed as if even misfortune had with her but a preserving power. It is not wonderful, however, that, while it worked thus upon her body, it should likewise have stiffened and withered and hardened her heart. I am not sure that conscience itself went untouched in this searing process. It is not clear at all that even her claim upon Sir John Hastings was not an unjust one; but just or unjust his repulse sunk deep and festered. Let us trace her from the church-yard after she met him. She took her path away from the park and the hamlet, between two cottages, the ragged boys at the doors of which called her "Old Witch," and spoke about a broom-stick. She heeded them little: there were deeper offences rankling at her heart. She walked on, across a corn-field and a meadow, and then she came upon some woodlands, through which a little sandy path wound its way, round stumps of old trees long cut down, amidst young bushes and saplings just springing up, and catching the sunshine here and there through the bright-tinted foliage overhead. Up the hill it went, over the slope on which the copse was scattered, and then burst forth again on the opposite side of wood and rise, where the ground fell gently the other way, looking down upon the richly dressed grounds of Colonel Marshall, at the distance of some three miles. Not more than a hundred yards distant was poor man's cottage, with an old gray thatch which wanted some repairing, and was plentifully covered with herbs, sending the threads of their roots into the straw. A little badly cultivated garden, fenced off from the hill-side by a loose stone wall, surrounded the house, and a gate without hinges gave entrance to this inclosed space. The old woman went in and approached the cottage door. When near it she stopped and listened, lifting one of the flapping ears of her cotton cap to aid the dull sense of hearing. There were no voices within; but there was a low sobbing sound issued forth as if some one were in bitter distress.