‘Yes; but Hortense and I have an understanding the most convenient in the world—that we shall each do as we please.’

‘How do you please to do?’

‘Three nights in the week I sleep in the mill. But I require little rest, and when it is moonlight and mild, I often haunt the Hollow at daybreak.’

‘When I was a very little girl, Mr. Moore, my nurse used to tell me tales of fairies being seen in that Hollow. That was before my father built the mill, when it was a perfectly solitary ravine. You will be falling under enchantment.’

‘I fear it is done,’ said Moore, in a low voice.

‘But there are worse things than fairies to be guarded against,’ pursued Miss Keeldar.

‘Things more perilous,’ he subjoined.

‘Far more so. For instance, how would you like to meet Michael Hartley, that mad Calvinist and Jacobin weaver? They say he is addicted to poaching, and often goes abroad at night with his gun.’

‘I have already had the luck to meet him. We held a long argument together one night—a strange little incident it was; I liked it.’

‘Liked it? I admire your taste! Michael is not sane. Where did you meet him?’

‘In the deepest, shadiest spot in the glen, where the water runs low under brushwood. We sat down near that plank bridge. It was moonlight, but clouded, and very windy. We had a talk.’

‘On politics?’

‘And religion. I think the moon was at the full, and Michael was as near crazed as possible; he uttered strange blasphemy in his Antinomian fashion.’

‘Excuse me, but I think you must have been nearly as mad as he, to sit listening to him.’

‘There is a wild interest in his ravings. The man would be half a poet if he were not wholly a maniac, and perhaps a prophet, if he were not a profligate. He solemnly informed me that hell was fore-ordained my inevitable portion; that he read the mark of the beast on my brow; that I had been an outcast from the beginning. God’s vengeance, he said, was preparing for me, and he affirmed that in a vision of the night he had beheld the manner and the instrument of my doom. I wanted to know further, but he left me with these words: ‘‘The end is not yet.’’’

‘Have you ever seen him since?’

‘About a month afterwards, in returning from market, I encountered him and Moses Barraclough, both in an advanced stage of inebriation; they were praying in frantic sort at the roadside. They accosted me as Satan, bid me avaunt, and clamoured to be delivered from temptation. Again, but a few days ago, Michael took the trouble of appearing at the counting-house door, hatless, in his shirtsleeves, his coat and castor having been detained at the public-house in pledge; he delivered himself of the comfortable message that he could wish Mr. Moore to set his house in order, as his soul was likely shortly to be required of him.’

‘Do you make light of these things?’

‘The poor man had been drinking for weeks, and was in a state bordering on delirium tremens.’