She vanished from her
window although he stood there. A moment later, in a coat and hat,
she came out of the front door, stood for a moment on the outskirts
of the mist looking about her, then vanished on to the moor.
"She oughtn't to be out in this," thought the farmer's wife. "It's
dangerous."
She waited a little, then came and knocked on the door of the other
sitting-room. She met Martin in the doorway.
"Oh, Mrs. Bolitho," he said, "I thought I'd go to the circus for
half an hour."
"Very well, sir," she said.
He too disappeared. She sat in her kitchen all the afternoon busily
mending the undergarments of her beloved James. But her thought were
not with her husband. She could not get the picture of those two
young things standing at the window facing the mist-drunk moor out
of her head. The sense that had come to the farm with Martin's entry
into it of something eerie and foreboding increased now with every
tick of the heavy kitchen clock. She seemed to listen now for sounds
and portents. The death-tick on the wall--was that foolish? Some men
said so, but she knew better. Had she not heard it on the very night
of her grandfather's death? She sat there and recounted to herself
every ghost-story that, in the course of a long life, had come her
way.
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