Freda turned quickly to her companion.
“Who are these people? What is their name?”
“Their neame’s Heritage,” said Barnabas.
Freda started. It was the name she had heard at the “Barley Mow” as that of the family who had quarrelled with “Rough Jock.”
CHAPTER III.
Freda watched the opening of the farmhouse door with dread, as there peeped out a man’s face, pale, flat, puffy, with light eyes and colourless light eyelashes. Freda took an instantaneous dislike to him, and tried to draw her companion back by the sleeve.
“What do you want at this time of night?” asked, the man pompously.
And Freda knew, by his speech and manner, that he was a man-servant, and that he was not a Yorkshireman. He now opened the door wider, and she saw that he was dressed in very shabby livery, that he was short and stout, and that a lady was standing in the narrow entrance-hall behind him. Barnabas caught sight of her too, and he hailed her without ceremony.
“Hey theer, missus,” he cried cheerily, “can Ah have a word with ’ee?”
Rather under than above the middle height, dressed plainly in a black silk gown, Mrs. Heritage was a woman who had been very pretty, and who would have been so still but for a certain discontented, worried look, which seemed to have eaten untimely furrows into her handsome features.