To go round by the tailor's desolate cottage did not sensibly impede their progress. Rotha had paid hurried visits daily to her forlorn little home since the terrible night of the death of the master of Shoulthwaite. She had done what she could to make the cheerless house less cheerless. She had built a fire on the hearth and spread out her father's tools on the table before the window at which he worked. Nothing had tempted him to return. Each morning she found everything exactly as she had left it the morning before.
When the girls reached the cottage, Liza instinctively dropped back. Rotha's susceptible spirit perceived the restraint, and suffered from the sentiment of dread which it implied.
“Stay here, then,” she said, in reply to her companion's unspoken reluctance to go farther. In less than a minute Rotha had returned. Her eyes were wet.
“He is not here,” she said, without other explanation. “Could we not go up the fell?”
The girls turned towards the Fornside Fell on an errand which both understood and neither needed to explain.
“Do the words of a song ever torment you, Liza, rising up in your mind again and again, and refusing to go away?”
“No—why?” said Liza, simply.
“Nothing—only I can't get a song out of my head today. It comes back and back—
One lonely foot sounds on the keep,
And that's the warder's tread.”
The girls had not gone far when they saw the object of their search leaning over a low wall, and holding his hands to his eyes as though straining his sight to catch a view of some object in the distance. Simeon Stagg was already acquiring the abandoned look of the man who is outlawed from his fellows. His hair and beard were growing long, shaggy, and unkempt. They were beginning to be frosted with gray. His dress was loose; he wore no belt. The haggard expression, natural to his thin face, had become more marked.