“My good creature,” said Evan, “it’s quite impossible that I should leave you in this state. Tell me where you were going when your illness seized you?”
“I was going,” she commenced vacantly, “to the sea—the water,” she added, with a shivering lip.
The foolish youth asked her if she could be cold on such a night.
“No, I’m not cold,” she replied, drawing closer over her lap the ends of a shawl which would in that period have been thought rather gaudy for her station.
“You were going to Lymport?”
“Yes,—Lymport’s nearest, I think.”
“And why were you out travelling at this hour?”
She dropped her head, and began rocking to right and left.
While they talked the noise of waggon-wheels was heard approaching. Evan went into the middle of the road, and beheld a covered waggon, and a fellow whom he advanced to meet, plodding a little to the rear of the horses. He proved kindly. He was a farmer’s man, he said, and was at that moment employed in removing the furniture of the farmer’s son, who had failed as a corn-chandler in Lymport, to Hillford, which he expected to reach about morn. He answered Evan’s request that he would afford the young woman conveyance as far as Fallowfield:
“Tak’ her in? That I will.