"You're a very wicked woman, Charity Grepe!" flamed Stapledon, "and a disgrace to the countryside and all who allow themselves to have any dealings with you. I thought you only charmed warts and such nonsense. But, here at the end of your life, you deal in these disgusting superstitions and apparently gull intelligent human beings with your tricks. Be sure a stop shall be put to that if I can bring it about. The hands at Endicott's at least won't patronise you any more. You might be locked up if half this was known."
"Then you won't help me to a higher way of living an' regular wages?"
"You must reform first. I can promise nothing."
Cherry, in doubt whether to bless or curse, but disposed towards the latter expression of her emotions, rose and eyed Stapledon suspiciously. He too rose, helped her with her bundle, and again assured her that she must promise reformation before he could undertake any practical assistance. So she hobbled away, uneasy and angered. Actual wounded feeling was at the bottom of her resentment. Whatever her real age, she was human, and therefore not too old to be vain. Since the death of Christopher Yeoland, Gammer Grepe had taken herself very seriously and been much impressed with the nature of her own powers.
Ten minutes later husband and wife met, and Stapledon spoke of his recent experience.
"Scor Hill Circle seems destined to be the theatre of all my strangest accidents."
"And most terrible, perhaps?"
"And most precious. But this last is grim enough. Just now that old hag Cherry Grepe was here begging and threatening in a breath. Think of it: she says she killed Christopher Yeoland!"
Time is like a Moor mist and weaves curtains of a density very uncertain, very apt to part and vanish in those moments when they look most impenetrable. Moods will often roll away the years until memory reveals past days again, and temperaments there are that possess such unhappy power in this sort that they can rend the curtain, defy time, and stand face to face at will with the full proportions of a bygone grief, though kindly years stretch out between to dim vision and soften the edges of remembrance.
Honor often thought of her old lover, and during this day, alone with her mind and the face of the Moor, she had occupied herself about him. She had a rare faculty for leaving the past alone, but, seeing that he was now dead, and that she believed in eternity, Honor pictured that state, and wondered if a friendship, impossible between two men and a woman, would be practicable for the three when all were ghosts. An existence purely spiritual was a pleasant image in her esteem, and to-day, while all unknowing she hovered on the brink of incidents inseparably entwined with flesh and womanhood, she bent her thoughts upon radiant pictures and dreamed strange dreams of an eternal conscious existence clothed only with light.