These questions were still in her mind when she heard a heavy footstep descending the stairs inside the house. It was the landlord, their guide of the previous day, who was rising thus early. Janet was on the point of appealing to him, but he spoke first.
"Your mistress must be a queer old lady," he said, with a strong Welsh accent, "to be up this hour of the morning, and rambling over the hills all by herself. I saw her a while ago from my bedroom window trotting along as comfortable as possible, and as if she had known the way from a child."
"In which direction was she going?" asked Janet, eagerly.
"Why, the road that we went yesterday; the road that leads to Ben Dulas tarn."
"Her ladyship is too weak and ill to come back on foot, and alone," said Janet. "I will hasten after her, and do you get out the ponies and follow as quickly as possible. I will engage that you shall be well remunerated for your trouble."
"In that case, miss, I'm at your service. I wont be five minutes behind you. A strange old lady, to be sure!"
Janet hurried off without another word, taking the narrow defile that led to the tarn. She ran with winged feet, and eyes that never swerved from their forward gaze. There was a vague sense of the beauty of the morning upon her, but her brain took in no distinct impressions of the time or the place.
At length she surmounted the last rise in the rocky road, and there before her lay the gloomy valley, peopled with dim shadows and fleecy fragments of mist. There, too, lay the steel-black waters of the lonely tarn.
Janet's eyes roving eagerly about rested before long on a dark huddled-up figure close to the margin of the lake. Anyone less sharp-sighted might have taken it for one of the grey boulder stones of which several were scattered about. But Janet was not deceived. She ran forward with a little cry, and stooping over the recumbent figure, tried to raise it in her arms. But she quickly found that this was beyond her strength. Lady Pollexfen could give her no assistance. She had been stricken with paralysis, and the use of her left side was entirely gone. Janet, however, contrived to raise her ladyship's head and shoulders so that they rested against her knee, and thus she awaited the arrival of the old guide.
"Is that you, child?" said Lady Pollexfen in a voice strangely broken and altered, as Janet tried to lift her up. "If it had not been for you I think I should have been dead long ago; but now I know that my time is drawing near."