led Joe.

"What now?"

"Do you sell your own flesh and blood?" said Joe. "Sell? What's thy
mare's nest now, thou weathercock? One wouldn't think that butter wad
melt in thy mouth sometimes, and then agen--"

"I'm none so daft as daftly dealt with, mother," interrupted the
blacksmith.

"I've telt thee afore thou'rt yan of the wise asses. What do you mean
by _sell?_"

"I reckon _you_ know when strangers in the street can tell me."

The blacksmith coiled himself up in his gloomy reserve and stared into
the fire.

"Oh, thou's heard 'at yon man's in Doomsdale, eh?"

Joe grunted something that was inarticulate.

"I mean to hear the trial," continued Mrs. Garth, with a purr of
satisfaction.

"Maybe you wouldn't like to see me in his place, mother? Oh, no;
certainly not."

"Thou great bledderen fool," cried Mrs. Garth, getting on to her feet
and lifting her voice to a threatening pitch; "whearaway hast been?"

Joe growled again, and crept closer over the fire, his mother's brawny
figure towering above him.

CHAPTER XLI. A HORSE'S NEIGH.

A bleared winter sun was sinking down through a scarf of mist. Rotha
was walking hurriedly down the lonnin that led from the house on the
Moss. Laddie, the collie, had attached himself to her since Ralph's
departure, and now he was running by her side.

She was on her way to Fornside, but on no errand of which she was
conscious. Willy Ray had not yet returned. Her father had not come
back from his long journey. Where was Willy? Where was her father?
What kept them away? And what of Ralph--standing as he did, in the
jaws of that Death into which her own hands had thrust him! Would hope
ever again be possible? These questions Rotha had asked herself a
hundred times, and through the responseless hours of the long days and
longer nights of more than a week she had lived on somehow, somehow,
somehow.

The anxiety was burning her heart away; it would be burnt as dry as
ashes soon. And she had been born a woman--a weak woman--a thing meant
to sit at home with her foot on the treadle of her poor little wheel,
while dear lives were risked and lost elsewhere.

Rotha was a changed being. She was no longer the heartsome lassie who
had taken captive the stoical fancy of old Angus. Tutored by
suffering, she had become a resolute woman. Goaded by something akin
to despair, she was now more dangerous than resolute.

She was to do strange things soon. Even her sunny and girlish