A great compassion held the girl as she watched Mistress Wayne clamber up the hill and turn at the summit and move along the sky-edge, her frailty showing pitilessly clear against the empty space behind her. The wrath of God held no place in the calculations of the Ratcliffes; but Janet had learned awe of the self-same storm-winds that had taught cruelty to her folk, and she trembled now to think that they had turned a want-wit—one of God's own people, according to the moorside superstition—into the heart of the pathless and bog-riddled heath.
"Come back!" she cried, running up the fields. "Come back! You cannot cross the marshes out beyond there!"
Mistress Wayne looked down after the cry had been twice repeated, and stopped a moment; then hurried forward faster than before. Janet quickened pace, fear gaining on her lest the other should be lost to view. The flying figure above moved with a lagging step now, and Janet overtook her at the wall-side which divided moor and field.
"You will not take me back, not take me back?" pleaded Mistress Wayne, shrinking close against the wall.
"I would see you safe to the lower ground, Mistress. Where would you go?"
The kindliness in Janet's voice wrought a sudden change in Mistress Wayne. She forgot her dread of the eyes which had haunted her throughout the night, and awoke to a keen sense of her present misery. "I will go home," she said—"home to Marsh House. I am faint, and very hungry. They gave me milk and a piece of oaten bread at a farmstead on the moor, but that is a long, long while ago—longer than I could tell you—is the way far to Marsh?"
"Not far," said Janet, and then, not knowing how else to find her a place of shelter, she took the little woman by the hand and led her down the moor until they reached the rough brack, cut from the solid peat and flanked on either hand by clumps of bilberry, which led to Marshcotes; and further toward Marsh House she would have gone with her, had not a glance at the sun told her that she could scarce get back to Wildwater before the dinner-hour.
"The road lies straight to Marshcotes," she said, stopping and pointing down the highway.
"Will you not come all the way with me?" pleaded Mistress Wayne, nestling closer to the girl's side.
"I cannot, Mistress. Grandfather may have lacked me as 'tis, and I dare not overstay the dinner-hour, lest he should guess what errand has brought me out of doors."