Her daughter brought the loaf of bread and also a pitcher of milk and two earthenware cups. The other girls left the white, strewn linen and drew near. The cottage was a lonely one, and few passed, and by nature all were kind-hearted and social. Alice gave a cup to each of the wanderers, and then, tilting the pitcher, filled the cups with milk. Giles and John Allen thanked her and, hungry and thirsty to exhaustion, drank and were refreshed. But Joan, when she had put down the cup, moved nearer to the mother of the three. “Did you ever see—the witch?” The woman, who had been listening to the church bells, turned her strong and kindly face. “Roger Heron brought her here once when she was a child. There was no ill in her then—or I saw it not. Roger Heron should not have had an evil child. There was little evil in him.” The middle daughter was more prim of countenance than the others. She now put on a shocked look. “But, mother! That is to deny Original Sin and Universal Guilt!” The elder woman made a gesture with her hand. It had in it a slight impatience. “I do not mean,” she said, “that we haven’t all of everything in us. But Roger Heron was a good man.” “Ah!” said the youngest daughter, “how any one can be a witch and hurt and harm, and be lost for aye, and leave a vile name—” “Aye,” said the second; “to know that your name was Joan Heron, and that it would be a byword for a hundred years!” “I am glad that Roger Heron died of the plague and waited not for a broken heart,” said the mother, and took the pitcher from the grass. “How far have you walked to-day?” Aderhold answered. Presently, the loaf of bread in hand, he said that they must go on if they would reach the port before night, and that they gave warm thanks for kindness.... They left the friendly cottage with the sunny spread of grass and the bleaching linen and the kindly women. A dip of the land, a turn of the path, and all vanished as if they had sunk into earth. Before them, fraying the horizon, they saw the distant town. Aderhold spoke. “You were there when you were a child. Do you remember it?” She answered. “I remembered at last—not at first: not plainly. I remember the sea.” Her voice was broken. He looked and saw that she was weeping. He had not seen her so since the last time he had come to Heron’s cottage, and she had wept for her father’s death. There had been no weeping in prison, nor in that Judgement Hall, nor since. He knew without telling that though she felt grief, she controlled grief. But now, startled by a tide she had not looked for, control was beaten down. All about them was a solitariness, a green and silent, sunny world. She struggled for a moment, then with a gesture of wild sorrow, sank upon a wayside rise of earth and hid her face. “Weep it out,” said Aderhold in a shaken voice; “it will do you good.”