'My good creature,' said Evan, 'it 's quite impossible that I should
leave you in this state. Tell me where you were going when your illness
seized you?'

'I was going,' she commenced vacantly, 'to the sea--the water,'
she added, with a shivering lip.

The foolish youth asked her if she could be cold on such a night.

'No, I'm not cold,' she replied, drawing closer over her lap the ends of
a shawl which would in that period have been thought rather gaudy for her
station.

'You were going to Lymport?'

'Yes,--Lymport's nearest, I think.'

'And why were you out travelling at this hour?'

She dropped her head, and began rocking to right and left.

While they talked the noise of waggon-wheels was heard approaching. Evan
went into the middle of the road, and beheld a covered waggon, and a
fellow whom he advanced to meet, plodding a little to the rear of the
horses. He proved kindly. He was a farmer's man, he said, and was at
that moment employed in removing the furniture of the farmer's son, who
had failed as a corn-chandler in Lymport, to Hillford, which he expected
to reach about morn. He answered Evan's request that he would afford the
young woman conveyance as far as Fallowfield: