e meant every word of it. The
jilted girl did not go to the wedding. She didn't need to, as far as
that was concerned, for old Granny Withers came hobbling over the
mountain fast as her crooked old legs would carry her, and it in the
dead of winter, mind you, to tell Widow Ashby's Sabrina all that had
happened. How lovely fair the bride looked beside her handsome
bridegroom! "Eh law, they were a doughty couple, Jasper and Talithie,"
Granny Withers mouthed the words. She lifted a bony finger, "Yet, mark
my words, ill luck awaits the two. When the bat flew into the house and
dipped low over the fair bride's head, she trembled like she had the
agger--and--"

"The bat flew over her head?" Sabrina interrupted, eyes glistening. "A
bat--it's blind--stone blind!" the jilted girl echoed gleefully.
"There's a sign for you, Mistress Jasper Tipton, to conjure with!" She
let out a screech and then a weird laugh that echoed through Crockett's
Hollow. She cast off the coverlid and in one bound was in the middle of
the floor, though she had lain long weeks pining away. She clapped her
hands high overhead like she was shouting at meeting. Sabrina laughed
again and again, holding her sides.

Granny Withers thought the girl bewitched. So did Widow Ashby and when
the two tried to put a clabber poultice on her head and sop her wrists
in it, the jilted Sabrina thrust them aside with pure main strength.
That was the night of the wedding.

The days went by. Jasper and Talithie were happy and content everyone
knew.

Old Granny Withers in her dilapidated hut up the cove watched and
carried tales to Sabrina. The forsaken girl listened as the old midwife
told how she had seen the two with arms about each other sitting in the
doorway in the evening many a time when their work was done. Or how she
had found them in loving embrace when by chance she happened to pass
along the far end of their corn patch. "Under the big tree, mind you!"
Granny Withers scandalized beyond further speech clapped hand to mouth,
rolled her eyes in dismay. "Just so plum lustful over each other they
can't bide till night time. The marriage bed is the fitten place for
such as that."

When the forsaken Sabrina heard such things she burned with envy and
jealousy. Secretly she tried to conjure the pair, to no avail. That had
been by wishing them ill. She meant to try again. One day she went far
into the woods and caught a toad. She put it in a bottle. "There you
are, Mist