oor. 'I'd rather be in old John's
chimney-corner, faith!'

'Who's there?' demanded a woman's voice from within. Being answered, it
added a hasty word of welcome, and the door was quickly opened.

She was about forty--perhaps two or three years older--with a cheerful
aspect, and a face that had once been pretty. It bore traces of
affliction and care, but they were of an old date, and Time had smoothed
them. Any one who had bestowed but a casual glance on Barnaby might
have known that this was his mother, from the strong resemblance between
them; but where in his face there was wildness and vacancy, in hers
there was the patient composure of long effort and quiet resignation.

One thing about this face was very strange and startling. You could not
look upon it in its most cheerful mood without feeling that it had some
extraordinary capacity of expressing terror. It was not on the surface.
It was in no one feature that it lingered. You could not take the
eyes or mouth, or lines upon the cheek, and say, if this or that were
otherwise, it would not be so. Yet there it always lurked--something for
ever dimly seen, but ever there, and never absent for a moment. It was
the faintest, palest shadow of some look, to which an instant of intense
and most unutterable horror only could have given birth; but indistinct
and feeble as it was, it did suggest what that look must have been, and
fixed it in the mind as if it had had existence in a dream.

More faintly imaged, and wanting force and purpose, as it were, because
of his darkened intellect, there was this same stamp upon the son.
Seen in a picture, it must have had some legend with it, and would have
haunted those who looked upon the canvas. They who knew the Maypole
story, and could remember what the widow was, before her husband's and
his master's murder, understood it well. They recollected how the change
had come, and could call to mind that when her son was born, upon the
very day the deed was known, he bore upon his wrist what seemed a smear
of blood but half washed out.

'God save you, neighbour!' said the locksmith, as he followed her, with
the air of an old friend, into a little parlour where a cheerful fire
was burning.

'And you,' she answered smiling. 'Your kind heart has brought you
here again. Nothing will keep you at home, I know of old, if there are
friends to serve or comfort, out of doors.'

'Tut, tut,' returned the locksmith, rubbing his hands and warmin