In a while Nance Edgar came out also, and she and Elsie soon got my poor mother into a comfortable bed. I had a word or two with Elsie. She would fain have come, making no doubt but that it was in the neighbourhood of that accursed house of the Moat Grange that my father, if, indeed, he were dead, had come by his end.
But I reminded her, first, that she was Hobby Stennis's own granddaughter. Also, she was a teacher in the local school, and, accordingly, leaving all else to one side, that she and I must not run the hills and woods as we had been in the habit of doing ever since she had come from Mrs. Comline's as a little toddling maid. Last of all, my mother would stay behind more contentedly if so be Elsie were with her.
Now it was a black frost, clean and durable. There had, of course,
