"Oh, Mrs. Bolitho," he said, "I thought I'd go to the circus for half an hour."
"Very well, sir," she said.
He too disappeared. She sat in her kitchen all the afternoon busily mending the undergarments of her beloved James. But her thought were not with her husband. She could not get the picture of those two young things standing at the window facing the mist-drunk moor out of her head. The sense that had come to the farm with Martin's entry into it of something eerie and foreboding increased now with every tick of the heavy kitchen clock. She seemed to listen now for sounds and portents. The death-tick on the wall—was that foolish? Some men said so, but she knew better. Had she not heard it on the very night of her grandfather's death? She sat there and recounted to herself every ghost-story that, in the course of a long life, had come her way. The headless horseman, the coach with the dead travellers, the three pirates and their swaying gibbets, the ghost of St. Dreot's churchyard, the Wailing Woman of Clinton, and many, many others, all passed before her, making pale her cheek and sending her heart in violent beats up and down the scale.
The kitchen grew darker and darker. She let the underclothes lie upon her lap. Soon she must light the lamp, but meanwhile, before the oven she let her fancies overwhelm her, luxuriating in her terror.
Suddenly the kitchen-door was flung open. She started up with a cry. Martin stood there and in a voice, so new to her that she seemed never to have heard it before, he shouted, "Where's Maggie?"
She stood up in great agitation. He came towards her and she saw that his face was violent with agitation, with a kind of rage.
"Where's Maggie?" he repeated.
She saw that he was shaking all over and it was as though he did not know who she was.
"Maggie?" she repeated.
"My wife! My wife!" he cried, and he shouted it again as though he were proclaiming some fact to the whole world.