"We were speaking of your lodger, mistress," rejoined Boatfield, raising his voice, "harm hath come to him, you know."
"Aye! aye!" she replied blandly, "harm hath come to our lodger. . . . Nay! the Lord hath willed it so. . . . The stranger was queer in his ways. . . . I don't wonder that harm hath come to him. . . ."
"You remember him well, mistress?—him and the clothes he used to wear?" asked Squire Boatfield.
"Oh, yes! I remember the clothes," she rejoined. "I saw them again on the dead who now lieth in Adam's forge . . . the same curious clothes of a truth . . . clothes the Lord would condemn as wantonness and vanity. . . . I saw them again on the dead man," she reiterated garrulously, "the frills and furbelows . . . things the Lord hateth . . . and which no Christian should place upon his person . . . yet the foreigner wore them . . . he had none other . . . and went out with them on him that night that the Lord sent him down into perdition. . . ."
"Did you see him go out that night, mistress?" asked the squire.
"Eh? . . . what? . . ."
"Did he go out alone?"
The dimmed eyes of the old woman roamed restlessly from face to face. It seemed as if that look of horror and of fear once more struggled to appear within the pale orbs. Yet the squire looked on her with kindness, and Lady Sue's tear-veiled eyes expressed boundless sympathy. Richard, on the other hand, did not look at her, his gaze was riveted on Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse with an intensity which caused the latter to meet that look, trying to defy it, and then to flinch before its expression of passionate wrath.
"We wish to know where your nephew Adam is, mistress," now broke in de Chavasse roughly, "the squire and I would wish to ask him a few questions."
Then as the Quakeress did not reply, he added almost savagely: