A man, coming, too, from the high street with his course shaped for Hawthorn Village, joined her where she stood. He was a wiry, crooked-shouldered, grizzle-headed, poorly clad person with a face of some knavery, cunning, and wildness. Over his shoulder, strung together with leather thongs, hung some small pots and pans, and in a leather pouch he seemed to carry tools and bits of metal. Joan recognized him for the tinker, who, after wandering far and wide, came back, at long intervals, to a hut just this side of Hawthorn. It appeared that on his part he remembered her face. “From Heron’s cottage, mistress?—near the Oak Grange.” He seemed to cast a glance upon the prison, but then he looked at her grey eyes and her face, paler to-day than was its wont, and asked if she had walked from home. She said yes, she had been to see the housekeeper at the castle—but she was not there. “Was she walking back to Hawthorn?” Yes, she said, and began to move across the prison square. He moved with her. “I walked from Hawthorn myself this morning. Matters to buy for my trade! Shall stop here at the Boar’s Head before I take the road back.” To her content he left her, and she went on by the great church and down the hill to the arched bridge. But when she had crossed it, and when the river behind her lay thin like a silver crescent, she found him again at her side. It was hot midday and the road bare of folk. She did not wish a travelling companion and would have liked to tell him so, but she was somehow cowed this noon, weary and listless where on the sunrise road she had been hopeful. She let him walk beside her, a freakish figure, vowed to mischief. Immediately he began to talk about the plague. Her father had died?—“Yes.”—He had been told so. Many people had died—many people in the town, and not so many, but enough in Hawthorn and roundabout. Once he saw the plague. He was lying in the heather on a hillside near a town that had it. Dark was coming. Then a great figure of a woman, black and purple, with a veil all over, rose straight up above the roofs and chimneys. She lifted her arms and took the veil from her head, and it was crowned with shiny gold and she was the Plague—and she floated in the sky and took her veil and drew it behind her, and every roof it touched they were going to die in that house.—Yes, tinkers saw strange things, wandering over the country. There were a many strange things, weren’t there? The plague left the country very fearful—and there was another strange thing, Fear! It took a man and knocked the heart out of him—but then to make up, it gave him more eyes and ears than he’d ever had before! He looked at her aslant. “Did you ever see the Devil?” “No.” “Then you aren’t fearful,” said the tinker. “Fearful folk can see him plain.”