as I strode down the hill and passed the wooden plank that lay across
the stream at its foot. A climb of less than a minute brought me to
the green gate in the wall of Sarah Gedye's garden patch; and here I
took a look backwards and upwards at Sheba. The sun lay warm on its
white walls, and the whole building shone against the burnt hillside.
It was too far away for me to spy Mrs. Bolverson's blue print gown
within the kitchen window, but I knew that she stood there yet.

The sound of a footstep made me turn. A woman was coming round the
corner of the cottage, with a bundle of mint in her hand.

She looked at me, shook off a bee that had blundered against her
apron, and looked at me again--a brown woman, lean and strongly made,
with jet-black eyes set deep and glistening in an ugly face.

"You want to know your way?" she asked.

"No. I came to see you, if your name is Sarah Gedye."

"Sarah Ann Gedye is my name. What 'st want?"

I took a sudden resolution to tell the exact truth.

"Mrs. Gedye, the fact is I am curious about an old charm that was
practised in these parts, as I know, till recently. The charm is
this--When a woman guesses her lover to be faithless to her, she
buries a suit of his old clothes to fetch him back to her. Mrs.
Bolverson, up at Sheba yonder--"

The old woman had opened her mouth (as I know now) to curse me. But