"I have been there," she answered.
He stared. "But they have the smallpox!" he exclaimed. "Did you know it?"
"I went there to avoid worse things," she cried; and fell to trembling. "Do you live here, sir?"
"Here? No; but I live in the valley below," he answered, still contemplating her with astonishment. "I am only here," he continued, with a touch of sternness which she did not understand, "because my duty leads me here. I am told--God grant it be not true--that there are three dead at the farm, and that the living are fled."
"It is true," she answered briefly. And against the verdure, framed in the beauty of this morning world, with its freshness, its dancing sunlight, and its flitting birds, she saw the death-room, the fœtid mist about the smoking guttering candles, the sheeted form. She shuddered.
"You are sure?" he said.
"I have seen them," she answered.
"Then I need go no farther now," he replied in a tone of relief. "I can do no good. I must return and get help to bury them. It will be no easy task; my parishioners are stricken with panic, they think only of their wives and families. Even in my own household--but I am forgetting, child. You are a stranger here? And, Lord bless me, what has become of your gown?"
She pointed to the place where it lay a little apart, in a heap on the ground. "I've taken it off," she explained, colouring slightly. "I fear it carries the infection. I was attacked in my carriage on the other side of the ford. And robbed. And to avoid worse things I took refuge in the house above."
"Lord save us!" he cried, lifting his hands in astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing! Never! We have had no such doings in these parts these twenty years!"