“I canna go,” said Higgins. “Dunnot ask me. I canna face her.”
“Thou knows her best,” said the man. “We’n done a deal in bringing him here—thou take thy share.”
“I canna do it,” said Higgins. “I’m welly felled wi’ seeing him. We wasn’t friends; and now he’s dead.”
“Well, if thou wunnot thou wunnot. Some one mun though. It’s a dree task; but it’s a chance, every minute, as she doesn’t hear on it in some rougher way nor a person going to make her let on by degrees, as it were.”
“Papa, do you go,” said Margaret, in a low voice.
“If I could—if I had time to think of what I had better say; but all at once——” Margaret saw that her father was indeed unable. He was trembling from head to foot.
“I will go,” said she.
“Bless yo’ miss, it will be a kind act; for she’s been but a sickly sort o’ body, I hear, and few hereabouts know much on her.”
Margaret knocked at the closed door; but there was such a noise, as of many little ill-ordered children, that she could hear no reply; indeed, she doubted if she was heard, and as every moment of delay made her recoil from her task more and more, she opened the door and went in, shutting it after her, and even, unseen by the woman, fastening the bolt.
Mrs. Boucher was sitting in a rocking-chair, on the other side of the ill-redd-up fireplace; it looked as if the house had been untouched for days by any effort at cleanliness.