He determined to give Bart and Jane fifteen minutes more. If they had not passed by during that time, he would leave the pool. It seemed pretty certain that the plot had failed. Billy had no watch, but he began to count slowly up to sixty, and each of these instalments represented one minute. The gloom increased, and unconsciously he hastened his counting. And then he heard voices and knew that the man and woman were passing, high above him in the fog. They shuffled slowly along and both spoke, but the plotter could not hear their words. He was quite safe from possibility of observation and so rose and descended to the sandy shore of the pool. Then he lifted up his voice and astonished himself, for his words rose and reverberated in the fog with a strange resonance, quite proper to the supernatural creature that might be supposed to live in Crazywell. "Bartholomew Stanbury! Bartholomew Stanbury!" he cried. Then he heard a woman’s thin shriek up aloft in the grey mist; and a man’s voice answered: "By God! who’s down theer?" But Billy made no reply to the question. He hastened to the further side of the pit and crawled up on to the Moor; then he ran for a couple of hundred yards, struck the Kingsett road and so got home, by Lether Tor Bridge, as swiftly as possible. Meantime a woman had fainted above Crazywell and a man was stirring himself wildly to restore her. It was neither Bart Stanbury nor Jane West who had been shocked at the message from the pool, but Bart’s mother and father. The young couple were far away, tramping in close communion along the highroad; but Constance and her husband had been to see sick Madge and take her and David their Christmas gift and good wishes. They were returning from Meavy Cot, and it was upon their ears--where they moved slowly-fog-foundered above Crazywell--that this mournful doom had fallen from invisible lips beneath. Mrs. Stanbury sank before the shock. She had just time to make her husband understand that it was the spirit of Crazywell who thus addressed them, before she lost consciousness. Bartholomew, too concerned for her to trouble about his own fate, gathered moisture from the heath, wetted her forehead and loosened her gown. But it was long before she recovered. She sat and shivered for half an hour upon a stone, and only by slow stages and with much assistance was able to reach her home. It had grown dark before man and wife returned to Coombeshead and Bartholomew got his partner to bed. She had suffered a terrific nerve shock and was incoherent until a late hour. Then she became intelligent, and her native pessimism thus fortified, broke loose in the small hours of Christmas morning.