"What can be the meaning of that?" asked Rachel Harmer, with a look
of curiosity. "Doth she often speak to thee of thy kindred, child?"

"If the whim be on her, and she has naught else to amuse her, she
will bid me tell of the life at home, and of our neighbours and
friends," answered Dorcas. "But never has she spoke as she did
today. Nor can I guess why she would have speech with Reuben."

"I can guess shrewdly at that," said the young man. "It so befell
this morning that I found a party of roisterers at her door, who were
marking it with a red cross, as though it were a plague-stricken
house--as the Magistrates talk of marking them now if the distemper
spreads much further and wider. The bold lady had herself put these
fellows to the rout by pouring pitch upon them from a window above;
but I stopped to rebuke the foremost of them myself, and to erase
their handiwork from the door. I did not know that I was either seen
or known; but methinks my Lady Scrope has eyes in the back of her
head, as the saying goes."

"You may well say that!" cried Dorcas, with a laugh and a shrug.
"Never was there such a woman for knowing everything and everybody.
But she spoke not to me of any roisterers. Would I had been there
to see her pouring her filthy compound over them! She always has it
ready. How she must have rejoiced to find a use for it at last!"

"It is an evil and a scurvy jest at such a time to mock at the
peril which is at our very doors, and which naught but the mercy of
God can avert from us," said the master of the house, very gravely.

Then, looking round upon his assembled household, he added in the