He was a tall man, plainly dressed in some dark stuff. Stopping as he did when he saw her, stepping aside a pace to give her room, he chanced to come into a ray of the last slant sunlight. It showed his face, a lined, rather strange, not unpleasing face. He was carrying in the hollow of his arm a grey and white cat. The creature lay stretched out, half-dead, blood upon its fur. “Ah,” said Joan, “it was that they were tormenting!” She stood still. She was sympathetic with animals; they were like everything else, living and loving to live. She thought they were very like human beings. “Aye,” said the man. “But it can recover. It is starved as well.” He looked at this chance-met young woman. “I meant to carry it back to Dorothy at the Grange,” he said. “But I am on my way to visit a sick man and it will be much out of my road. Do you live anywhere near?” He knit his brows a little. He thought that by now he knew all faces for a long way around, but he did not know her face. “Aye,” said Joan. “I live at Heron’s cottage.—If you wish me to, I’ll take her and give her milk to drink and let her lie by the hearth for a while.” They were standing beneath the very last line of trees, before there began the bit of waste and the ruined garden. The village boys were there yet, turned—all but two of them—to some other idle sport about the chimney and the fallen beams. These two, loath to give up the beast they were tormenting, and childishly wrathful against the intruder, stood watching him from behind a thorn bush. “Will you do so?” said Aderhold. “That is well! I am going your way through the wood. I will carry it until we reach the path to the cottage.” They moved from the clearing and the sight of the thorn bush. It was dim now in the wood, with an evening wind and darkness stealing through. They walked rather swiftly than slowly. “I heard that Goodman Heron had come back,” said Aderhold. “You are his daughter?” “Yes. I’m Joan.” “You have been away a long time.” “Aye. Three years come Saint John’s Eve.” “Three years.—I have been here three years.” “You are the physician?” asked Joan. “You live at the Oak Grange with Master Hardwick?” “Aye. At the Oak Grange.” “They say that fairies dance there and that a demon haunts it.” “‘They say’ is the father and mother of delusion.” “I would wish there were no demons,” said Joan, “but some fairies are not ill folk. But the minister saith that God hates all alike.” They came to the edge of the forest, before them the threadlike green path to Heron’s cottage. “I must go on now by the road,” said Aderhold. Joan held out her hands and he put in them the white and grey cat. “You are a good maid to help me,” he said. “I have little power to do aught for any one, but if I can serve you ever I will.” He turned to the road and the sick man, she to the cottage gate.