sinister, like drawn swords in firelight, between
the distant woods and cornfields. The death-like stillness and
smallness of the low-lying rigid landscape made the contrast with the
rushing enormity and turmoil of the heavens almost terrific.

Great clouds shouldered up out of the sea, blotting out the low sun,
darkening the already darkened earth, and then towered up the sky,
releasing the struggling sun only to extinguish it once more, in a new
flying cohort.

I do not know how long I stood there, spellbound, the woman lost in the
artist, scribbling frantically in my notebook, when an onslaught of rain
brought me to my senses and I looked round for shelter.

Then I became aware that I had not been watching alone. A
desolate-looking figure, crouching at a little distance, half hidden by
a gorse-bush, was watching too, watching intently. She got up as I
turned and came towards me, her uncouth garments whipped against her by
the wind.

The rain plunged down upon us, enveloping us both as in a whirlwind.

"There is an empty cottage under the down," I shouted to her, and I
began to run towards it. It was a tumbledown place, but "any port in
such a storm."

"It is not safe," she shouted back; "the roof is falling in."

The squall of rain whirled past as suddenly as it had come, leaving me
gasping. She seemed to take no notice of it.

"I spent last night there," she said. "The ceiling came down in the next
room. Besides," she added, "though possibly that may not deter you,
there are two policemen there."

I saw now that it had been the cottage which she had been watching. And
sure enough, in a broken shaft of sunshine which straggled out for a
moment, I saw two dark figures steal towards the cottage under cover of
the wall.

"Why are they there?" I said, gaping at such a strange sight. For I had
been many months at Rufford, and I had never seen a policeman.

"They are lying in wait for some one," she said.

It flashed back across my mind how at luncheon that day the vicar had
said that a female convict had escaped from Ipswich gaol, and had been
traced to Bealings, and, it was conjectured, was lurking in the
neighbourhood of Woodbridge.

I took sudden note of my companion's peculiar dark bluish clothes and
shawl, and the blood rushed to my head. I knew what those garments
meant. She pushed back her grizzled hair from her lined, walnut-coloured
face, and we looked hard at each other.

There was no fear in