She sat there some time, but at last, with a long breath, she stood up, looked a moment longer, then turned and, reëntering the wood, faced homeward. She had strolled and sauntered and spent her time. Now the sun was getting low in the west. Presently she left the road and took the forest track that would bring her again by the burned cot.
Through the thinning wood she saw the place before her, in shadow now, except that the top of the plum tree was gold. She thought that she still heard the boys’ voices. Then, just at the edge of the clearing, she came suddenly face to face with a man.
He was a tall man, plainly dressed in some dark stuff. Stopping as he did when he saw her, stepping aside a pace to give her room, he chanced to come into a ray of the last slant sunlight. It showed his face, a lined, rather strange, not unpleasing face. He was carrying in the hollow of his arm a grey and white cat. The creature lay stretched out, half-dead, blood upon its fur.
“Ah,” said Joan, “it was that they were tormenting!” She stood still. She was sympathetic with animals; they were like everything else, living and loving to live. She thought they were very like human beings.
“Aye,” said the man. “But it can recover. It is starved as well.” He looked at this chance-met young woman. “I meant to carry it back to Dorothy at the Grange,” he said. “But I am on my way to visit a sick man and it will be much out of my road. Do you live anywhere near?” He knit his brows a little. He thought that by now he knew all faces for a long way around, but he did not know her face.
“Aye,” said Joan. “I live at Heron’s cottage.—If you wish me to, I’ll take her and give her milk to drink and let her lie by the hearth for a while.”
They were standing beneath the very last line of trees, before there began the bit of waste and the ruined garden. The village boys were there yet, turned—all but two of them—to some other idle sport about the chimney and the fallen beams. These two, loath to give up the beast they were tormenting, and childishly wrathful against the intruder, stood watching him from behind a thorn bush.
“Will you do so?” said Aderhold. “That is well! I am going your way through the wood. I will carry it until we reach the path to the cottage.”
They moved from the clearing and the sight of the thorn bush. It was dim now in the wood, with an evening wind and darkness stealing through. They walked rather swiftly than slowly.
“I heard that Goodman Heron had come back,” said Aderhold. “You are his daughter?”