“I must tell you, Miss Betsey,” he replied, “I have hid it in my heart too long. He says to me, ‘I am just looking to see where the fire really started, it seems that it must have been at this end where the workshop stood.’ I says ‘Yes, sir,’ not being wishful to have any talk with him. And after a little he says again, ‘It was a beautiful old place. I can see plainly why Miranda longs for it and cannot be happy where she is.’ And this time I says nothing but puffs away at my pipe. It roused my anger, some way, to see him peering about, though I am a slow-witted fellow and had no guess at what he was looking for. At last he speaks once more. ‘Why don’t they build it up again, Michael?’ he says. ‘They could if they weren’t such a careless impractical pair. They should be living here again, I have no patience with them.’ Then my wrath boils up in me and I tells him what I thinks. ‘You have no patience, have you,’ says I, ‘with them that took you in and cared for you and bore with those ways you have that no one likes. You’re prosperous yourself through their help, if you want them to rebuild their house why don’t you give them aid in doing it? Miss Miranda toils and saves and has her garden and her ducks and anything she can think of to make things go forward, so that her father will have what he needs for his work.’ All of that I says to him and I wish the Saints had struck me dumb before I spoke. “‘She works so that her father may have what he needs?’ he repeats. ‘So that is how things stand, just as I had been suspecting. Thank you, Michael, that is all I wanted to know,’ he says and goes, leaving me gaping after him as he walks away over the snow. I did not know even then what use he was to make of what I had told him, but I saw well enough that I had done harm. And so I have been doing all I could to make amends,” he ended sadly; “I have watched over the house that he should never come near with Miss Miranda not there, though I guessed but little what it was he would do. And when it seemed of no use and I felt helpless and afraid, thinking of the mischief I had done, I have turned to trying to drive away the ill luck in the old fashion, with spells and charms, just—just because there might be something in them after all.” He ceased speaking and closed his eyes, worn out by the effort of confession. “He used to watch by the garden gate long before Miss Miranda’s cousin ever showed himself,” was Betsey’s whispered comment to David. “He was sitting there on the bench in the dark, that night we sat by the pool and Miss Miranda told us the story of the green jade tree. He was probably watching on the very evening that Donald Reynolds finally came.”