Her woman guest was silent. She sat with bead-like blue eyes now on Joan, now upon the kitchen from wall to wall. But Will’s perturbation remained. The events of the day, North-End Farm talk and the tinker’s talk, the atmosphere of heat and storm, church and the denunciation of his old master’s kinsman, the physician with whom at the Oak Grange he had himself been in daily contact, the talk at the forester’s which had been of the marvellous, indeed, and the evident power of Satan; afterwards the dark wood, the lightning, rain, and thunder, and then the momentary spectral vision through the window, which now, it seemed, was naught—all wrought powerfully upon his unstable imagination. There flowed into his mind his long-ago adventure with the wolf that ran across the snow-field, and was trapped that night but never found ... but old Marget Primrose was found with her ankle cut. The remembrance dragged with it another—he was again with that same physician sitting his horse before the portal of the great church in the town—the carvings in the stone struck with almost material force back into his mind that was edged already with panic. _Witches and devils...._ And the tinker’s talk of how Scotland was beset, and Satan buying women, old and young.... He had always thought of witches being old like Marget Primrose or like Mother Spuraway—but, of course, they could be young.... The forester’s wife, that afternoon, had said something—it hummed back through his head. Her beehives were bewitched by Joan Heron’s beehives.... His mind was tinder to every superstitious spark. With a whistling breath and a shuffling of the feet, he rose from the settle. “We’re dry and warm now, mother.—Let’s be getting home.” His mother, it seemed, was ready. Her parting with Joan was somewhat tight-lipped and stony. “Seeing that you are alone now in the world ’tis a pity you ever had to leave living by the town and the castle! There were fine strange doings there that you miss, no doubt—” The two went out into the declining day. The rain had ceased, but the wind blew hard, driving vast iron-grey clouds across the sky. However, since the thunder had rolled away, one could talk. As soon as the two were out of the cottage gate and upon the serpentine green path, wet beneath the wet trees, they began to talk. “It was something,” said Will; “and then when we got within, it was nothing.... Mother!” “Aye, aye,” said his mother. “It wasn’t to be seen plain. But she was not by herself.”