Then Moggy lighted the fire with the stump of a candle, for the night was a little chill, and she set the small round table beside it, and laid her master’s pipe and tobacco-box on it, and listened, and began to wonder what detained him.

So she went out into the sharp still air, and stood on the hall-door step, and listened again.  Presently she heard the Widow Macan walking up from the garden with the last pail on her head, who stopped when she saw her, and set down the vessel upon the corner of the clumsy little balustrade by the door-step.  So Moggy declared her uneasiness, which waxed greater when Mrs. Macan told her that ’the masther, God bless him, wasn’t in the garden.’

She had seen him standing at the river’s edge, while she passed and repassed.  He did not move a finger, or seem to notice her, and was looking down into the water.  When she came back the third or fourth time, he was gone.

At Moggy’s command she went back into the garden, though she assured her, solemnly—­’’twas nansince lookin’ there’—­and called Mr. Nutter, at first in a deferential and hesitating way; but, emboldened and excited by the silence, for she began to feel unaccountably queer, in a louder and louder a key, till she was certain that he was neither in the garden nor in the orchard, nor anywhere near the house.  And when she stopped, the silence seemed awful, and the darkness under the trees closed round her with a supernatural darkness, and the river at the foot of the walk seemed snorting some inarticulate story of horror.  So she locked the garden door quickly, looking over her shoulder for she knew not what, and ran faster than she often did along the sombre walk up to the hall door, and told her tale to Moggy, and begged to carry the pail in by the hall-door.

In they came, and Moggy shut the hall-door, and turned the key in it.  Perhaps ’twas the state in which the poor lady lay up stairs that helped to make them excited and frightened.  Betty was sitting by her bedside, and Toole had been there, and given her some opiate, I suppose, for she had dropped into a flushed snoring sleep, a horrid counterfeit of repose.  But she had first had two or three frightful fits, and all sorts of wild, screaming talk between.  Perhaps it was the apparition of Mary Matchwell, whose evil influence was so horribly attested by the dismal spectacle she had left behind her, that predisposed them to panic; but assuredly each anticipated no good from the master’s absence, and had a foreboding of something bad, of which they did not speak; but only disclosed it by looks, and listening, and long silences.  The lights burning in Nutter’s study invited them, and there the ladies seated themselves, and made their tea in the kitchen tea-pot, and clapped it on the hob, and listened for sounds from Mrs. Nutter’s chamber, and for the step of her husband crossing the little court-yard; and they grew only more nervous from listening, and there came every now and then a little tapping on the window-pane.  It was only, I think, a little sprig of the climbing-rose that was nailed by the wall, nodding at every breath, and rapping like unseen finger-tops, on the glass.  But, as small things will, with such folk, under such circumstances, it frightened them confoundedly.