along the course of the Edera, and many a time a letter written in
blood had been fastened with a dagger to the door of church or
cottage, intimating the will of the unseen chief to the subjugated
population. Of late years less had been heard and seen of such men;
but they or their like were still heard and felt sometimes, up above
in lonely forests, or down where the moorland and macchia met, and
the water of Edera ran deep and lonely. In her girlhood, a father, a
son, and a grandson had been all killed on a lonely part of the
higher valley because they had dared to occupy a farm and a
water-mill after one of these hillmen had laid down the law that no
one was to live on the land or to set the waterwheel moving.

That had been a good way off, indeed, and for many a year the Edera
had not seen the masked men, with their belts, crammed with arms and
gold, round their loins; but still, one never knew, she thought;
unbidden guests were oftener devils than angels.

And it seemed to her that the child could not really be asleep all
this time in a strange place and the open air. At last she got up,
went again to the bench and drew her handkerchief aside, and looked
down on the sleeper; on the thin, narrow chest, the small, bony
hands, the tiny virginal nipples like wood strawberries.

She saw that the slumber was real, the girl very young and more than
half-starved. "Let her forget while she can," she thought, and
covered her face again. "It is still early in the day."

The bees hummed on; a low wind swept over a full-blown rose and shook
its loose leaves to the ground. The shadow from the ruined tower
began to touch the field which lay nearest the river, a sign that it