"Where is the Mistress? I can find her nowhere," he said, leaning against the doorway.
Martha looked up from the joint that was turning on the spit, and settled herself into an easiful attitude that suggested a hope of gossip.
"Nay, I cannot tell ye, Maister," she answered. "I've been wondering myseln, for I've niver set een on her sin' afternooin. Mary telled me 'at Mistress Wayne came in, looking gaumless-like an' flaired, an' a two-three minutes at after Mistress Nell went out wi' her. But nawther one nor t' other hes comed back that I knaw on."
Wayne nodded curtly to Martha and turned on his heel, cutting short her expectation of a pleasant round of doubt and fear and surmise.
"I would they were safe back again," he muttered. "Nell must be fey, to go wandering abroad at this late hour."
A brisk step sounded behind him, as Nanny Witherlee entered by the outer door of the kitchen and hobbled across the rush-strewn flag-stones.
"Good-even, Maister. Is there owt wrang at Marsh?" said the Sexton's wife.
"Why, Nanny, what dost thou here?" cried Wayne. "Lord, nurse, thou wear'st thy eerie look, as if thou wert ringing God-speed to a dead man's soul. What ails thee to cross from Marshcotes after sundown?"
"Nay, I've heard th' wind sobbing all th' day, like a bairn that's lost on th' moor; an' th' wind niver cries like yond save it hes getten gooid cause. So, says I, at after Witherlee an' me hed hed our bit o' supper, I'll step dahn to Marsh, says I, for I cannot bide a minute longer without knawing what's agate."
Wayne kept well in the shadow of the passage, for he shrank from letting Nanny see the marks he carried of the late fight—shrank, too, from showing how prone he was to-night to catch the infection of her ghostly speech. This bent old woman, with her sharp tongue, her outspokenness, her queer, familiar talk of other-worldly things, had never lost her hold upon the Master; she was still the nurse who lang syne had sent him shivering to bed with her tales of wind-speech and of water-speech, of the Dog, and the Sorrowful Woman, and the shrouded shapes that stalked at midnight over kirkyard graves. He had been no more than vaguely troubled hitherto by Nell's absence; but now he feared the worst, for he had never known the Sexton's wife make prophecy of dole for naught.