Margeret went into the house, taking Amos with her, and left Alisoun to make her decision alone. There, as the dusk fell, she walked among the flowers, back and forth through the calm, quiet, sweet-smelling garden. Here dwelt the memory of Master Simon, of all the good that he had done and of the courage of her own father and mother in those stirring early days. Could she follow them, could she dare to be as brave as they?
She was in the garden a long, long time; so long that the stars had come out when she went in at last, and a black silent bat flitted past her as she stood on the doorstep. She found that Margeret had put the excited Amos to bed and was singing him to sleep.
“I will do it, mother,” she said simply. Margeret kissed her and answered quietly,
“I thought that you would!”
And for that night the matter was laid to rest.
The public examination of Mother Garford was to be held at the meeting-house next morning, at such an early hour that many of the people on the outlying farms must tumble out of their beds long before sun-up if they were to be there in time to get good places and hear every word that passed.
“If this foul witch be disposed of quickly,” they said to one another piously, “it may be that the good Lord will see our right intentions and not visit us with another.”
It was, therefore, the idea of all of Hopewell that Mother Garford should be condemned at once. That there was doubt of her guilt was a thought that had not entered the mind of any one in that hurrying crowd.
As Alisoun and her mother crossed the garden on their way up to the meeting-house with Amos running impatiently on ahead, the girl hung back to take one last look at the flowers in all their beauty and brightness on that radiant Spring morning. It seemed to her scarcely possible that she could go through the ordeal before her, or ever come back to be lighthearted and happy in that dear place again. Although the blue May sky was without a cloud, the very sunshine seemed cold and dull as though the terror of her shy, shrinking spirit had cast a blight over everything.
As she looked down the hillside toward the shining bay she saw suddenly a white sail rise above the headland and, standing breathless with hope and fear, she watched a great vessel round the point, turn slowly and, with all its high-towering sails set to catch the light wind, stand in toward the wharf. Alisoun could not mistake that tall bow and broad, heavy stern. It was the Margeret, one of her father’s ships, home from the West Indies and bringing Gilbert Sheffield to be another witness of what she must do that day.