way with sorrow, because of
his gracious manner, "please to let me cry a bit."

He stood away, and seemed to know that women want no help for that. And
by the way she cried he knew that they had killed her husband. Then,
having felt of grief himself, he was not angry with her, but left her to
begin again.

"Loth would I be," said mother, sobbing with her new red handkerchief,
and looking at the pattern of it, "loth indeed, Sir Ensor Doone, to
accuse any one unfairly. But I have lost the very best husband God ever
gave to a woman; and I knew him when he was to your belt, and I not up
to your knee, sir; and never an unkind word he spoke, nor stopped
me short in speaking. All the herbs he left to me, and all the
bacon-curing, and when it was best to kill a pig, and how to treat the
maidens. Not that I would ever wish--oh, John, it seems so strange to
me, and last week you were everything."

Here mother burst out crying again, not loudly, but turning quietly,
because she knew that no one now would ever care to wipe the tears. And
fifty or a hundred things, of weekly and daily happening, came across my
mother, so that her spirit fell like slackening lime.

"This matter must be seen to; it shall be seen to at once," the old man
answered, moved a little in spite of all his knowledge. "Madam, if any
wrong has been done, trust the honour of a Doone; I will redress it to
my utmost. Come inside and rest yourself, while I ask about it. What was
your good husband's name, and when and where fell this mishap?"

"Deary me," said mother, as he set a chair for her very polite, but she
would not sit upon it; "Saturday morning I was a wife, sir; and Saturday
night I was a widow, and my children fatherless. My husband's name was
John Ridd, sir, as everybody knows; and there was not a finer or better
man in Somerset or Devon. He was coming home from Porlock market, and a
new gown for me on the crupper, and a shell to put my hair up--oh, John,
how good you were to me!"

Of that she began to think again, and not to believe her sorrow, except
as a dream from the evil one, because it was too bad upon her, and
perhaps she would awake in a minute, and her husband would have the
laugh of her. And so she wiped her eyes and smiled, and looked for
something.

"Madam, this is a serious thing," Sir Ensor Doone said graciously, and
showing grave concern: "my boys are a little wild, I know. And yet I
cannot think that they would willingly harm any