ut Winterborne in progress in the village street,
opposite Mr. Melbury's gates, where Timothy Tangs the elder and Robert
Creedle had accidentally met.

The sawyer was asking Creedle if he had heard what was all over the
parish, the skin of his face being drawn two ways on the
matter--towards brightness in respect of it as news, and towards
concern in respect of it as circumstance.

"Why, that poor little lonesome thing, Marty South, is likely to lose
her father. He was almost well, but is much worse again. A man all
skin and grief he ever were, and if he leave Little Hintock for a
better land, won't it make some difference to your Maister Winterborne,
neighbor Creedle?"

"Can I be a prophet in Israel?" said Creedle. "Won't it! I was only
shaping of such a thing yesterday in my poor, long-seeing way, and all
the work of the house upon my one shoulders! You know what it means? It
is upon John South's life that all Mr. Winterborne's houses hang. If
so be South die, and so make his decease, thereupon the law is that the
houses fall without the least chance of absolution into HER hands at
the House. I told him so; but the words of the faithful be only as
wind!"

CHAPTER XIII.

The news was true. The life--the one fragile life--that had been used
as a measuring-tape of time by law, was in danger of being frayed away.
It was the last of a group of lives which had served this purpose, at
the end of whose breathings the small homestead occupied by South
himself, the larger one of Giles Winterborne, and half a dozen others
that had been in the possession of various Hintock village families for
the previous hundred years, and were now Winterborne's, would fall in
and become part of the encompassing estate.

Yet a short two months earlier Marty's father, aged fifty-five years,
though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have been looked on
as a man whose existence was so far removed from hazardous as any in
the parish, and as bidding fair to be prolonged for another quarter of
a century.

Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day thinking of the
contingency. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the
cabbage-plots, the apple-trees, his dwelling, cider-cellar,
wring-house, stables, and weathercock, were all slipping away over his
head and beneath his feet, as if they were painted on a magic-lantern
slide, was curious. In spite of John South's late indisposition he had
not anticipated danger.