Towards midnight the creature became easier, and, gathering her legs under her, lay down to sleep. But Bridget remained three hours longer in the close atmosphere of the cow-house, waiting for old Will but thinking of Dan, and making her needles go with a furious click at the thought of his threat to evict her. The upper half of the cow-house door stood open, and somewhere in the dark hours towards dawn she was startled by a bright light and the hissing and crackling of a sudden fire outside. She knew what it was (such fires on the mountains were not uncommon), but nevertheless she stepped out to see. She saw more than she had expected. In the glen below her brew, where every bush and tree stood out for a moment in the flare of the burning gorse, she saw the figure of a woman. The woman was standing by the _Clagh-ny-Dooiney_. She had something white under her arm. After a moment she knelt, put her parcel under the lip of the stone and then hurried away. Who was she? In her present mood, with her mind running on one subject, Bridget could have no uncertainty. It was the Collister girl! It must be! What had she been doing down there? In her own walk through life Bridget had never stepped aside, therefore she was severe on those who had. There was only one thing that could bring a girl out of bed in the middle of the night to a place like that. The slut! The strumpet! When Will Skillicorne reached home half-an-hour afterwards he was carrying a wisp of straw. With this he was to make the sign of the cross on the back of the sick cow, and say some good words about St. Patrick and St. Bridget, giving it at the same time a hot drink of meal and water. "But the craythur is better these three hours," said Bridget. "Praise the Lord!" said Will. "That must have been the very minute the good man came down from his bed to me in his flannel drawers!" "But did thou meet anybody as thou was coming up the glen?" "Maybe I did." "Was it a woman?" "It's like it was, now." "Did she go into the mill-house?" "I believe in my heart she did, though." Bridget was triumphant. It was the Collister girl! There could not be a doubt about it. And at break of day she would go down to the glen and see what she had left under the _Clagh-ny-Dooiney_. "Show me the road at Hollantide, will he? The dirt! The dirty black toad! We'll see! We'll see!" IV Bessie's sleep of exhaustion deepened to delirium and for a long day she lay in the grip of it. When she floated out of her unconsciousness, she had a sense of confusion. A babel of meaningless voices, like the many sounds of a wild night, were clashing in her brain. A man and a woman were in her bedroom, talking like somnambulists. "Her feet have been bleeding. Where has she been, think you?" The man's voice must be that of Doctor Clucas, and then came some vague answer in the woman's voice, with a thick snuffle and a suppressed sob--her mother's.