A tall form interposed between him and the mouth of the pit--that of Meg Pennet. She had been watching for a body which had not yet been brought up. Suddenly she turned to Mr. Chattaway. "You have killed him, master; you have made my children orphans. But for your coming in your hardness to drive him out when he warn't fit to go, we should ha' had somebody still to work for us. Happen you may have heered of a curse? I'd like to give ye one now." "Somebody take this woman away," cried Chattaway. "She'll be better at home." "Ay, take her away," retorted Meg; "don't let her plaints be heered, lest folk might say they be just. Send her home to her fatherless children, and send her dead man after her to lie among 'em till his burial. Happen, when you come to your death, Mr. Chattaway, you'll have us all afore your mind, to comfort you!" She stopped. Another ill-fated man was being drawn up, and she turned to wait for it, her hands clenched, her face white and haggard in its intensity. The burden came, and was laid near the rest; but it was not the one for which she waited. Another woman darted forward; _she_ knew it too well; and she clasped her hands round it, and sobbed in agony. Meg Pennet turned resolutely to the mouth of the pit again, watching still. "Be they all dead? How many was down?" The voice came from behind Meg Pennet, and she screamed and started. There stood her husband. How had he escaped from the pit? "I haven't been a-nigh it," he answered. "I couldn't get down to the pit, try as I would, without a rest, and I halted at Green's. Who's dead among 'em, and who's alive?" "God be thanked!" exclaimed Meg Pennet, with a sob of emotion. All Mr. Chattaway's faculties were strained on the mouth of that yawning pit, and what it might yield up. As body after body was brought to the surface--seven of them were up now--he cast his anxious looks upon it, expecting to recognise the fair face of Rupert Trevlyn. Expecting and yet dreading--don't think him worse than he was; with the frightened, half-shrinking dread ordinarily experienced by women, or by men of nervous and timid temperament. So utterly did this suspense absorb him as to make him almost oblivious to the painful features of the scene, the wails of woe and bursts of lamentation. Happening for a minute to turn his eyes from the pit, he saw in the distance a pony-carriage approaching, which looked uncommonly like that of Miss Diana Trevlyn. Instinct told him that the two figures seated in it were his wife and Miss Diana, although as yet he could not see whether they were women or men. It was slowly winding down a distant hill, and would have to ascend another and come over the flat stretch of country ere it could reach them. He beckoned his clerk Ford to him in a sort of terror.