sque, yet I noticed he waited with great
patience for her to hobble out of the way.

Meanwhile I was watching the old creature with much interest. She had
not a common face or a common manner. She was gray, she was toothless,
she was haggard, and she was bent, but she was not ordinary or just one
of the crowd of old women to be seen on country doorsteps. There was
force in her aged movements and a strong individuality in the glances
she shot at us as she backed slowly out of the roadway.

"Do they say she is imbecile?" I asked. "She looks far from foolish to
me."

"Hearken a bit," said he. "Don't you see she is muttering? She talks to
herself all the time." And in fact her lips were moving.

"I cannot hear her," I said. "Make her come nearer. Somehow the old
creature interests me."

He at once beckoned to the crone; but he might as well have beckoned to
the tree against which she had pushed herself. She neither answered him
nor gave any indication that she understood the gesture he had made. Yet
her eyes never moved from our faces.

"Well, well," said I, "she seems dull as well as deaf. You had better
drive on." But before he could give the necessary jerk of the reins, I
caught sight of some pennyroyal growing about the front of the cottage a
few steps beyond, and, pointing to it with some eagerness, I cried: "If
there isn't some of the very herb I want to take home with me! Do you
think she would give me a handful of it if I paid her?"

With an obliging grunt he again pulled up. "If you can make her
understand," said he.

I thought it worth the effort. Though Mr. Gryce had been at pains to
tell me there was no harm in this woman and that I need not even
consider her in any inquiries I might be called upon to make, I
remembered that Mr. Gryce had sometimes made mistakes in just such
matters as these, and that Amelia Butterworth had then felt herself
called upon to set him right. If that could happen once, why not twice?
At all events, I was not going to lose the least chance of making the
acquaintance of the people living in this lane. Had he not himself said
that only in this way could we hope to come upon the clue that had
eluded all open efforts to find it?

Knowing that the sight of money is the strongest appeal that can be made
to one living in such abject poverty as this woman, making the blind to
see and the deaf to hear, I drew out my purse and held up before her a
piece of silver. She bounded as if s