to a
steady gallop. Jim Tregay turned himself half-about in his seat.

"From battle and murder and from sudden death--good Lord, deliver us!"

"Oh, Jim, be kind and tell us!"

"Your grandfather, missy--the old maister! They found 'en in the
counting-house this mornin' dead as a nail!"

Myra, with an arm about Clem and her disengaged hand gripping the light
rail of the cart, strove to fix her mind, to bring her brain to work upon
Jim's words. But they seemed to spin past her with the hedgerows and the
rushing wind in her ears. A terrible blow had fallen. Why could she not
feel it? Why did she sit idly wondering, when even a dumb creature like
Actress seemed to understand and put forth all her fleetness?

"Who sent you for us? Susannah?"

"Susannah's no better than a daft woman. Peter Benny sent me.
He took down the news to Mrs. Purchase, and she told him where you was
gone. He called out the horse-boat and packed me across the ferry
instanter."

Myra gazed along the ridge of the mare's back to her heaving shoulders.

"Clem!" she whispered.

"Yes," said the boy slowly, "I am trying to understand. Why are we going
so fast?"

So he too found it difficult. In truth their grandfather had stood
outside their lives, a stern, towering shadow from the touch of which
they crept away to nestle in each other's love. Because his presence
brooded indoors they had never felt happy of the house. Because he
seldom set foot in the garden they had made the garden their playground,
their real nursery; the garden, and on wet days the barn, the hay-lofts,
the apple-lofts, any Alsatia beyond the rules, where they could run free
and lift their voices. He had never been unkind, but merely neglectful,
unsmiling, coldly deterrent, unapproachable. They knew, of course,
that he was great, that grown men and women stood in awe of him.

When at length Jim Tregay reined up in the roadway above the ferry, they
found a vehicle at a stand there, with a rough-coated grey horse in a
lather of sweat; and peering over the wall from her perch in the
spring-cart, Myra spied Mr. Benny on the slipway below, in converse
with a tall, black-coated man who held by the hand a black-coated boy.
As a child, she naturally let her gaze rest longer on the boy than on the
man; but by and by, as she led Clem down the slipway, she found herself
staring at the two with almost equal distaste.

Little Mr. Benny ran up the slipway to meet the childr