He saw that she attended. “Witches! First they begin by having commerce with elves and fays, green men, and such. They get into fairy hills and eat and drink there, and they dance in the moonlight around trees in the wood. But the elves are the Devil’s cousins, and he’s always on hand, and some night he comes smirking up, dressed now this way and now that. So the woman drops a curtsy, and he puts out his hand and gives her something, just as he did in Eden Garden. She takes it, and that seals her both sides of the Judgement Day! Pay for pay! Blood gives him strength, and so he sucks from a little place he makes upon her body—that’s the witch mark that can’t be made to feel pain, and that’s why we strip and prick witches to find their mark, which is better proof even than their confessing! Now she’s the Devil’s servant and leman forever, and begins to work evil and practise the Black Art. He shows her how to fly through the air and change herself into all manner of shapes. Then she goes to his Sabbat and learns to know other witches and maybe a wizard or two, though there aren’t so many wizards. They’re mostly witches and demons. If you look overhead at night you can sometimes see a scud of them flying between you and the moon. Then begin the tempests of hail and thunder and lightning, and the ships that are sunk at sea, and the murrain in the cattle, and the corn blighted and ricks burned and beasts lamed and children possessed and gear taken and sickness come—” He stopped to cough and also to observe if she were listening. She was listening. He was saying nothing that she had not heard before. They were commonplaces alike of pulpit and doorstep. But it had all been like figures seen afar off and upon another road. Now she had come to a place in life where, bewildered, she found them about her. Joan was conscious that life was becoming like an evil dream. Just as in a dream a hundred inconsequences might form the strongest net, entangling you, withholding you from some longed-for escape, so now, awake, a hundred things so little in themselves— She never said to herself that there was a net weaving about her; the mind, struck and bewildered, could not yet give things a name, perhaps would not if it could. She only saw the gold and warmth going for her steadily out of the sunshine—and knew not how it came that they were going nor how to stop that departure. Now she said dully, “I do not believe all that,” and then saw immediately that it was a mistake for any one to say that.