Chapter 3 - Page 2

shed, carpeted around with the dead leaves that lay
about everywhere. Night, that strange personality, which within
walls brings ominous introspectiveness and self-distrust, but
under the open sky banishes such subjective anxieties as too
trivial for thought, inspired Marty South with a less perturbed
and brisker manner now. She laid the spars on the ground within
the shed and returned for more, going to and fro till her whole
manufactured stock were deposited here.

This erection was the wagon-house of the chief man of business
hereabout, Mr. George Melbury, the timber, bark, and copse-ware
merchant for whom Marty's father did work of this sort by the
piece. It formed one of the many rambling out-houses which
surrounded his dwelling, an equally irregular block of building,
whose immense chimneys could just be discerned even now. The four
huge wagons under the shed were built on those ancient lines whose
proportions have been ousted by modern patterns, their shapes
bulging and curving at the base and ends like Trafalgar line-of-
battle ships, with which venerable hulks, indeed, these vehicles
evidenced a constructed spirit curiously in harmony. One was
laden with sheep-cribs, another with hurdles, another with ash
poles, and the fourth, at the foot of which she had placed her
thatching-spars was half full of similar bundles.

She was pausing a moment with that easeful sense of accomplishment
which follows work done that has been a hard struggle in the
doing, when she heard a woman's voice on the other side of the
hedge say, anxiously, "George!" In a moment the name was repeated,
with "Do come indoors! What are you doing there?"

The cart-house adjoined the garden, and before Marty had moved she
saw enter the latter from the timber-merchant's back door an
elderly woman sheltering a candle with her hand, the light from
which cast a moving thorn-pattern of shade on Marty's face. Its
rays soon fell upon a man whose clothes were roughly thrown on,
standing in advance of the speaker. He was a thin, slightly
stooping figure, with a small nervous mouth and a face cleanly
shaven; and he walked along the path with his eyes bent on the
ground. In the pair Marty South recognized her employer Melbury
and his wife. She was the second Mrs. Melbury, the first having
died shortly after the birth of the timber-merchant's only child.

"'Tis no use to stay in bed," he said, as soon as she came up to
where he was pacing restlessly about. "I can't sleep--I keep
thinking of things, and worrying about the girl, till I'm quite in
a fever of anxiety." He went on to say that he could not think
why "she (Marty knew he was speaking of his daughter) did not
answer his letter. She must be ill--she must,