“I’m a-going over to Dick’s to fetch Beccy,” replied Mrs. Stephen. “It’s a long while since she was here. Ste don’t care to see children about the place. The child shall stop to dinner with us and can go home by herself in the afternoon. What’s the matter now, Eunice Gibbon? Don’t it please ye?”
“Oh, it pleases me well enough,” returned Eunice, who was looking anything but pleased, and splashing both hands desperately about in the water, over one of Stephen’s coloured cotton handkerchiefs. “The child can come, and welcome, for me. ’Tain’t that.”
“It’s some’at else then,” remarked Becca.
“Well, I’d wanted to get a bit o’ talk with ye,” said Eunice. “That’s what it is. The master’s safe off, and it was a good opportunity for it.”
“What about?”
Eunice Gibbon took her hands out of the soap-suds and rested them on the sides of the tub, while she answered—coming to the point at once.
“I’ve been a-thinking that I can’t stop on here, Becca. I bain’t at ease. Many a night lately I have laid awake over it. If anything comes out about—you know what—we might all of us get into trouble.”
“No fear,” said Becca.
“Well, I says there is fear. Folks have talked long enough; but it strikes me they won’t be satisfied with talking much longer: they’ll be searching out. Only yesterday morning when I was waiting at Duffham’s while he mixed up the stuff, he must begin upon it. ‘Did ye hear the cries last night?’ says he—or something o’ that. ‘No,’ says I in answer; ‘there was none to hear, only the wind.’ Them two young gents from the Manor was there, cocking up their ears at the words. I see ’em.”
Rebecca Radcliffe remained silent. Truth to tell, she and Stephen were getting afraid of the cries themselves. That is, of what the cries might result in.