'I am ready, mother,' answered the bride, descending.
The hall was well lighted; and as she came down, followed by Mirelle, she looked radiant, proud, triumphant. She waved back Mirelle, lest she should step on her veil, with an angry, insolent gesture.
'My word, Orange! you are a beauty! I'll run and call your father.'
But he was beyond call.
CHAPTER XXXI.
JOYCE'S PATIENT.
Joyce and her patient could not remain concealed. Her cries had been heard when she fell—literally tooth and nail—on Sampson Tramplara, and those who heard them, being superstitious, thought best to keep away from the spot whence they had sounded.
Later in the evening the farmer of Coombow, coming home from a cattle fair, heard the moans and wailing in the wood, and was greatly scared by the injured horse, which had thrust itself into the hedge. So sincerely alarmed was he, and so thoroughly did his account of what he had heard and seen frighten his household, that not one of his sons—no, not all of them in phalanx, armed with pitchforks and lighted by lanthorns, would venture that night into the high road to ascertain the cause of the alarm.
With morning, however, courage came, and early, when the day began to break, nearly the entire household, male and female, went out to see whether there was any natural explanation to be found for those things that had, in the darkness, so scared Farmer Facey.
The horse was found.