Bridget was triumphant.
It was the Collister girl! There could not be a doubt about it. And at break of day she would go down to the glen and see what she had left under the Clagh-ny-Dooiney.
"Show me the road at Hollantide, will he? The dirt! The dirty black toad! We'll see! We'll see!"
IV
Bessie's sleep of exhaustion deepened to delirium and for a long day she lay in the grip of it. When she floated out of her unconsciousness, she had a sense of confusion. A babel of meaningless voices, like the many sounds of a wild night, were clashing in her brain. A man and a woman were in her bedroom, talking like somnambulists.
"Her feet have been bleeding. Where has she been, think you?"
The man's voice must be that of Doctor Clucas, and then came some vague answer in the woman's voice, with a thick snuffle and a suppressed sob—her mother's.
Bessie heard no more. A cloud passed over her brain that was like the rolling mist that alternately reveals and conceals a bell-buoy at sea. When it cleared she heard a strange woman's voice outside the house—her bedroom door had been left open that her mother might hear her if she called.
"I didn't know thy daughter had come home, Liza Collister."
"And how dost thou know now, Bridget Skillicorne?"