The tinker again looked aslant. “Most of your witches are old women. At their Sabbats you’ll see a hundred withered gammers, dancing and leaping around a fire with the Devil sitting in the midst, and all sing-songing a charm and brewing in a kettle a drink with which to freeze men’s blood! But each crew hath always one young witch that they call the maiden. A young and well-looking wench with red lips and she calls the dance. They were burning such an one where I was a while ago in Scotland. She cried out, ‘I be no witch! I be no witch!’ to the end. But they sang and prayed her down and she burned on.” Joan moistened her lips. “Why did they think she was—” “Ah,” said the tinker, “there was a young laird she had bewitched! He peaked and pined and syne he cried out that a dirk was always turning in his side. So they found, beneath the hearth in her cot, a figure of wax with a rusted nail set in its side, and as the wax melted away, so was he to pine. And there were other tokens and matters proved on her. Beside, when they tried her in the loch she never sank at all. _Convicta et combusta_—which is what they write in witch cases upon the court book.” By now they were much advanced upon the Hawthorn road. The day was warm, the air moist and languid. Joan felt deadly tired. There swam in her mind a desire to be away, away—to find a door from this earth that was growing drear and ugly. She moved in silence, her grey eyes wide and fixed. The tinker, his throat dry with talking, drew in front of him one of the pans which he carried and in lieu of further speech drummed upon it as he walked. Presently a cart came up behind them, empty but for a few trusses of hay, and the carter known to them both, being Cecily Lukin’s brother. “Hey!” said the tinker. “Give me a lift!” The cart stopped. “Get in!” said Lukin. He stared at Joan. The tinker, swinging himself up, spoke with a grin. “There’s room for you too—” Joan shook her head. She made no halting, but went on by in her greyish gown and wide hat with her basket on her arm. The carter flicked his horse, the cart passed her, left her behind, in a few minutes disappeared around a bend of the road. To the last the two men stared back at her; she seemed to hear Lukin’s slow, clownish voice repeating Cecily’s tattle—Cecily’s and Alison’s. Hawthorn Village grew plain before her: thatched cottages, the trees upon the green, the church yews and the church tower—there flashed upon her again yesterday at church, and Master Aderhold in prison. He was a good man; despite what the minister had said, she believed that with passion—he was a good man. It had not kept them from haling him to prison. What would they do to him, what?... She came to the path that would spare her going through the village and turned into it from the highway. It led her by the stream and through the fields and out upon Hawthorn Forest road. Heron’s cottage was in sight when she met Goodman Cole, walking to the village.