The Sexton's wife was afraid of no man that stepped; but ghosts, and fairies, and the mad folk who shared communion with the spirits, touched a bare nerve of dread. And so she stopped midway down the graveyard path, and turned, and went back to where Mistress Wayne was cowering above her lover's body. It was not that the Sexton's wife had any wish to help this woman, who had smirched the honour of the Waynes, but that she feared the disaster which refusal of such help might bring.
"She's fairy-kist," she muttered for the twentieth time, looking down at the frail figure. "God or the devil looks to such, they say an' I mun do th' best for her, I reckon."
"Ay, 'tis cold, 'tis bitter cold, and Dick will surely never come," said Mistress Wayne, getting to her feet and glancing fearfully across the kirkyard.
"Not to-night, Mistress. Ye'd best wend home wi' me, an' search for him to-morn," put in the Sexton's wife.
Mistress Wayne did not answer for awhile; she was watching the moonlight glance freakish, cold and wan, from out the purple-yellow of the clouds—was listening to the curlew-wail that thrilled across the stark, dim moor. And, slowly, as she stood there, the closed door of her mind seemed to swing back a little, letting the sense of outward things creep in. It was a dream, then, that Dick was coming to take her safe into shelter of the valleys; this was the moor that closed her in—the moor, whose face had frightened her, whose storms had chilled her to the bone, through all the brief months of her wedlock with Wayne of Marsh. She gazed and gazed into the moon-dusk, with still face and rounded, panic-stricken eyes; and from the dusk strange shapes stole out and mouthed at her.
This for a long moment—and then she ran like a scared child to the little old woman's arms, and hid her face, and entreated protection from that wilderness which had grown a live, malignant presence to her.
"Give me house-walls about me—give me light, and warmth—Mary Mother, hark how the night-birds wail, and scream, and mock me," she cried, with sobs between each panting plea.
The Sexton's wife, not understanding how any one should fear the moor to which she had lived bedfellow these five-and-sixty years, was yet quick to snatch the opportunity. It would never do to leave this witless body to the night-rain and the cold, and who knew how soon she might fall again upon her lover's body and again refuse to quit the spot?
"Come wi' me," she muttered, putting an arm about Mistress Wayne and hurrying her across the gravestones.
"Where wilt take me?" cried the other, half halting on the sudden. "Not—not to Marsh House, where Wayne lies and haunts me with that still look of reproach?"