“Grace Maybank!” Mother Spuraway’s voice quavered and her frame seemed to shake. Perhaps there rose a memory of a love philtre or charm, or of Grace in trouble, coming secretly for counsel. But Mother Spuraway never took life. The child was born, was it not?—as merry and pretty a child as if it were not set apart and branded for life. Grace? It had been little that she had done for Grace! The charm had not worked; the man would not offer marriage, and so save Grace from what came upon her. Grace herself had come to the hut and bitterly reviled her for a useless wise woman. Grace Maybank! She began to stammer and protest that she and Grace were strangers.—But Master Clement thought the most and the worst and the impossible. “Ha!” he said. “That window hath a light in it!” In his mind Grace’s name left the one wall and came over to the other. The squire made a movement from the constable, the constable a movement toward his prisoner. “Tell me,” said Master Clement in a tense and low voice,—“tell me why you gave a bush of rue to Joan Heron?” He had not known that she had done it. It had flashed upon him to make that move. Made, he saw that it was correct. Mother Spuraway, dazed and shaken, put up her two hands as though to ward off blows that she knew not why were coming. “What harm,” queried her thin old frightened voice, “in giving a body a sprig of rue? She had none in her garden.” “How did the rue come to you?” “It was growing about the burned cot.” For all her terror and misery Mother Spuraway felt a gust of anger. “O Jesus! What questions Master Clement asks!” The constable came and took her by the arms. “On with you! Don’t say that you can’t walk, when we know that you can dance and fly!” She broke again into a pitiful clamour. “I am no witch!—Satan’s no friend nor master nor king of mine—I know naught of the leech—I’ve put no spell on any one—Oh, gentlemen, gentlemen, think on the mother that bore you—” The constable and his helpers dragged her away. Her voice came back—“Think—think! How could I—” In a little while the North-End Farm folk came into Hawthorn—Hawthorn quivering now with excitement. Every loss of a twelvemonth, every undeserved grief, every untoward happening, every petty mystery was awake and growing monstrous. The air was changing, the yew trees, the look of the houses, the loom to the west of Hawthorn Forest.... To-day, to an observer, the church might look not greatly different from a palm-thatched or cedar roof over some sacred stone or carven god. Out of the deep veins, out of the elder world, old and gross superstition had been whistled up. It had not far to come; the elder world was close of kin. On the climbing road of the human mind the scenery of the lower slopes began to glow.