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The woman stood straight upright, with her hands clasped behind her, before the deal table. She gazed, under lowered brows, straight out of window; and following that gaze, I saw across the coombe a mean mud hut, with a wall around it, that looked on Sheba Farm with the obtrusive humility of a poor relation.

“Does she–does Sarah Gedye–live down yonder?”

“What is that to you?” she enquired fiercely, and then was silent for a moment, and added, with another short laugh–

“I reckon I’d like the question put to her: but I doubt you’ve got the pluck.”

“You shall see,” said I; and taking my coat off the towel-horse, I slipped it on.

She did not turn, did not even move her head, when I thanked her for the shelter and walked out of the house.

I could feel those steel-blue eyes working like gimlets into my back as I strode down the hill and passed the wooden plank that lay across the stream at its foot. A climb of less than a minute brought me to the green gate in the wall of Sarah Gedye’s garden patch; and here I took a look backwards and upwards at Sheba. The sun lay warm on its white walls, and the whole building shone against the burnt hillside. It was too far away for me to spy Mrs. Bolverson’s blue print gown within the kitchen window, but I knew that she stood there yet.

The sound of a footstep made me turn. A woman was coming round the corner of the cottage, with a bundle of mint in her hand.

She looked at me, shook off a bee that had blundered against her apron, and looked at me again–a brown woman, lean and strongly made, with jet-black eyes set deep and glistening in an ugly face.

“You want to know your way?” she asked.

“No. I came to see you, if your name is Sarah Gedye.”

“Sarah Ann Gedye is my name. What ‘st want?”

I took a sudden resolution to tell the exact truth.

“Mrs. Gedye, the fact is I am curious about an old charm that was practised in these parts, as I know, till recently. The charm is this–When a woman guesses her lover to be faithless to her, she buries a suit of his old clothes to fetch him back to her. Mrs. Bolverson, up at Sheba yonder–“

The old woman had opened her mouth (as I know now) to curse me. But as Mrs. Bolverson’s name escaped me, she turned her back, and walked straight to her door and into the kitchen. Her manner told me that I was expected to follow.

But I was not prepared for the face she turned on me in the shadow of the kitchen. It was grey as wood-ash, and the black eyes shrank into it like hot specks of fire.

“She–she set you on to ask me that?” She caught me by the coat and hissed out: “Come back from the door–don’t let her see.” Then she lifted up her fist, with the mint tightly clutched in it, and shook it at the warm patch of Sheba buildings across the valley.

“May God burn her bones, as He has smitten her body barren!”

“What do you know of this?” she cried, turning upon me again.

“I know nothing. That I have offered you some insult is clear: but–“

“Nay, you don’t know–you don’t know. No man would be such a hound. You don’t know; but, by the Lord, you shall hear, here where you’m standin’, an’ shall jedge betwix’ me an’ that pale ‘ooman up yonder. Stand there an’ list to me.

“He was my lover more’n five-an’-thirty years agone. Who? That ‘ooman’s wedded man, Seth Bolverson. We warn’t married”–this with a short laugh. “Wife or less than wife, he found me to his mind. She–she that egged you on to come an’ flout me–was a pale-haired girl o’ seventeen or so i’ those times–a church-goin’ mincin’ strip of a girl–the sort you men-folk bow the knee to for saints. Her father owned Sheba Farm, an’ she look’d across on my man, an’ had envy on ‘en, an’ set her eyes to draw ‘en. Oh, a saint she was! An’ he, the poor shammick, went. ‘Twas a good girl, you understand, that wished for to marry an’ reform ‘en. She had money, too. I? I’d ha’ poured out my blood for ‘en: that’s all I cud do. So he went.