vorrow disappeared.

They searched everywhere for him, but could find no trace of him, and
the search was finally abandoned in despair.

Elijah had made his way to the fogou, determined to front Hate and to
compel her to keep faith with him, even if he squeezed her life out
through her throat.

* * * * *

Some eight months after--in the time of blackberries--some youngsters,
questing among the ferns on the hillside, stumbled across the fogou and
crept in to explore it.

They rushed down the hillside screaming with terror; and, when safe
among the cottages, began to babble incoherently that there was a ghost
up yonder in the "owld hunted fogou," they had seen its face--and it
was white--so white!

The villagers began to have an inkling of the truth, and went toiling up
through the ferns in a body.

"As like as not 'tes _he_, poor saul," they whispered awesomely as they
clambered up the windy ridges of the hill.

True enough, it was Elijah, dead in the fogou. But whether or not he had
again met Hate there, is one of the questions the gossips have still to
solve.

FOOTNOTES:

[N] A subterranean storehouse or place of shelter.

[O] A portion of the rites practised in connection with "cursing
stones."

THE HAUNTED HOUSE.

IT was only an old deserted house, perched half-way up the hillside and
overlooking the village. But it was none the less the village theatre:
the peep-hole through which the villagers obtained a glimpse of many
mysteries, and the stage and drop-scene of half the legends of the
thorp.

It was an old stone building which evidently had once been a dwelling of
importance, but for quite a century it had been tenantless and almost
entirely dismantled: the home of the owl and the lizard, of the spectre
and the bat.

When the sunrise splashed across the fragmentary panes of glass that
here and there remained in their frames, the farmer would stand still at
his ploughing on the hill-slope and glance up at the great Argus-eyed
building--that had now, however, more sockets than eyes--and a world of
memories, of legends and superstitions, would buzz, with strange
bewilderment, through his brain.

The old house reminded him of his mother and of his grandfather, and of
those who had been the village historians for his childhood, and a
musing gravity seemed to deepen in his mind. He was aware of the brevity
of life, and of the lapse of the personality; of the