you there is naught else. If your horse had beat my face
into the dust, none would have known where I lay at last. Five days
have I walked and my very clothes I changed with a gipsy woman. None
would have known." Suddenly she looked up with shame and terror in her
eyes, the blood flaming in her face. She involuntarily clutched at his
sleeve as if in her horror she must confide even to this stranger.
"They had begun to look at me--and whisper," she said. "And one day a
girl who hated me laughed outright as I passed--though I strove to bear
myself so straightly--and I heard her mock me. 'Pride cometh first,'
she said, 'and then the fall. _She_ hath fallen far.'"

She looked so young and piteous that Roxholm felt a mist pass before
his eyes.

"Poor child!" he said; "poor child!"

"I was proud," she cried. "It was my sin. They taunted me that he was a
gentleman and meant me ill, and it angered me--poor fool--and I held my
head higher. He told me he had writ for his Chaplain to come and wed us
in secret. He called me 'my lady' and told me what his pride in me
would be when we went to the town." She put her hands up to her working
throat as if somewhat strangled her, and the awful look came back into
her widened eyes. "In but a little while he went away," she
gasped--"and when he came back, and I went to meet him in the dark and
fell weeping upon his breast, he pushed me back and looked at me, and
curled his lip laughing, and turned away! Oh, John!--John Oxon!" she
cried out, "God laughs at women--why shouldst not thou?" and her
paroxysm began again.

At high noon a wagoner whose cart was loaded with hay drove into the
rick yard of a decent farm-house some hours' journey from the turn in
the road where my lord Marquess had been so strangely checked in his
gallop. An elderly gentleman in Chaplain's garb and bands rode by the
rough conveyance, and on a bed made in the hay a woman lay and groaned
in mortal anguish.

The good woman of the house this reverend gentleman saw alone and had
discourse with, paying her certain moneys for the trouble she would be
put to by the charge he commanded to her, himself accompanying her when
she went out to the wagon to care for its wretched burden.

Throughout the night she watched by her patient's bedside, but as day
dawned she left it for a moment to call the Chaplain to come quickly,
he having remained in the house that he might be at hand if need should
be, in accordance with his