her responding cry do? And her cry was seized on by the tyrannous
wind, and borne farther away in the opposite direction to that from
which the call of agony had proceeded. Again she listened; no sound:
then again it rang through space; and this time she was sure it was
human. She turned into the house, and heaped turf and wood on the
fire, which, careless of her own sensations, she had allowed to fade
and almost die out. She put a new candle in her lantern; she changed
her shawl for a maud, and leaving the door on latch, she sallied out.
Just at the moment when her ear first encountered the weird noises of
the storm, on issuing forth into the open air, she thought she heard
the words, "O God! O help!" They were a guide to her, if words they
were, for they came straight from a rock not a quarter of a mile from
Yew Nook, but only to be reached, on account of its precipitous
character, by a round-about path. Thither she steered, defying wind
and snow; guided by here a thorn-tree, there an old, doddered oak,
which had not quite lest their identity under the whelming mask of
snow. Now and then she stopped to listen; but never a word or sound
heard she, till right from where the copse-wood grew thick and
tangled at the base of the rock, round which she was winding, she
heard a moan. Into the brake--all snow in appearance--almost a plain
of snow looked on from the little eminence where she stood--she
plunged, breaking down the bush, stumbling, bruising herself,
fighting her way; her lantern held between her teeth, and she herself
using head as well as hands to butt away a passage, at whatever cost
of bodily injury. As she climbed or staggered, owing to the
unevenness of the snow-covered ground, where the briars and weeds of
years were tangled and matted together, her foot felt something
strangely soft and yielding. She lowered her lantern; there lay a
man, prone on his face, nearly covered by the fast-falling flakes; he
must have fallen from the rock above, as, not knowing of the