“Yes,” assented the old Irishman meekly, “I know better and the priest is always telling me so. But yet—when there’s trouble to them you love and seemingly no way out of it, why, you look back at the old fancies and wonder if they were not true after all, and you feel the need to try this thing or to try that thing, just in case there might be help in it.” “And what were you doing here?” David asked. “It is on this house that the ill luck lies, for it was in its burning that the evil fortune began and it is only through its building up again that happiness can come back to Miss Miranda. And so—and so—just to make the luck change, it is the old way to take a candle in your hand and to walk through every part of the house saying spells as you go. And the last of the spells must be said in the hour before midnight in the dark of the moon. But Miss Betsey stopped me,” he concluded regretfully. “This was to be the last night, yet I did not get the whole of the way.” “She came just in time,” David corrected him. “The walls beyond here are weaker even than these, and high enough to bury you completely if they should fall. I was awake and heard the gate swinging, and I was trying to think how it came to be open, but it was Betsey that was quick enough to understand in time. When she ran down the stairs I got up to follow her, yet I really did not guess what was happening until I heard you fall. You must thank her that you are still alive.” “But if the bad luck still holds,” protested Michael pitifully, “then it will be all to do over again!” He was silent as though gathering strength for further speech and then began once more. “And I must tell you that what has been going amiss is, the whole of it, through fault of mine. There was a day, it was before you ever came to the cottage, when Mr. Donald was last here that—that—” His voice faltered, perhaps through weakness, perhaps through reluctance to go on, but he drew a breath and continued bravely. “That very morning, when I was getting my breakfast I spilled the salt dish and I thought to myself, ‘Michael Martin, you will be losing your temper with some one this day.’ But who was there for me to quarrel with except Miss Miranda and her father and the good Saints know I could never be vexed with them. So I went about my work and thought no more about it. “But that afternoon I went over to the old house, it was late winter still and I was wishing to gather some pine cones for Miss Miranda’s hearth, and, for all the cold, I sat down on a stone to smoke a pipe and think about the old times and how happy we all were before the fire came. And there was Mr. Donald, walking about the broken walls, peering here and peering there, but not stepping within for he is of the sort that are always careful of the safety of their precious skins.” He stopped again to rest his trembling voice. “Don’t try to tell us, Michael, if it is so hard,” Elizabeth said.