The door presently opened and Garde was bidden to enter. Her heart pounded with tumultuous strokes in her breast. She could barely put one foot before the other. She caught at the door-frame to prop herself up as she entered the dimly-lighted, shadow-haunted room.
Then her gaze leaped swiftly up where the magistrates were sitting. She saw strangers only—men she knew in the town, but not David Donner. She felt she should faint, when one of the men turned about, and she recognized her grandfather, looking feverish, wild-eyed and hardly sane. This was why she had not known him sooner.
“Oh, Grandther!” she suddenly cried. “It’s I! It’s Garde! Oh, save me! Oh, take me home!”
She flung off Goody’s shawl, and darting forward ran to her grandfather’s side and threw her arms like a child about his neck, where she sobbed hysterically and laughed and begged him to take her away.
The court was smitten with astonishment from which no one could, for the moment, recover.
Randolph had pressed quickly forward. But he now retired again into the shadow.
“What’s this? What’s this?” demanded the chief of the magistrates, sternly. “What business is this? What does this mean? Where is——”
“Witchcraft! A young witch! Cheated! We are cheated! The young witch has cheated us of the old witch!” cried Pinchbecker, shrilly.
“My child! My child!” said David Donner. “This is no witch, fellow-magistrates and friends.”
“She has cheated us of the old witch!” repeated Pinchbecker wildly. “She has daily consorted with a notorious witch. She has aided a witch to escape. She is a witch herself! We know them thus! She is a dangerous witch! She is a terrible young witch!”