"You're come at last," said he. "One of our kind (i.e., station)
would not have left his wife to mourn by herself over her dead child;
nor would one of our kind have let his father kill his own true son.
I've a good mind to take her from you for ever."

"I did not tell him," cried Nest, looking piteously at her husband;
"he made me tell him part, and guessed the rest."

She was nursing her babe on her knee as if it was alive. Owen stood
before Ellis Pritchard.

"Be silent," said he, quietly. "Neither words nor deeds but what are
decreed can come to pass. I was set to do my work, this hundred
years and more. The time waited for me, and the man waited for me.
I have done what was foretold of me for generations!"

Ellis Pritchard knew the old tale of the prophecy, and believed in it
in a dull, dead kind of way, but somehow never thought it would come
to pass in his time. Now, however, he understood it all in a moment,
though he mistook Owen's nature so much as to believe that the deed
was intentionally done, out of revenge for the death of his boy; and
viewing it in this light, Ellis thought it little more than a just
punishment for the cause of all the wild despairing sorrow he had
seen his only child suffer during the hours of this long afternoon.
But he knew the law would not so regard it. Even the lax Welsh law
of those days could not fail to examine into the death of a man of
Squire Griffith's standing. So the acute Ellis thought how he could
conceal the culprit for a time.

"Come," said he; "don't look so scared! It was your doom, not your