"Ease a woman's heart, perhaps." Her voice had a deeper, longer note.
He looked vindictive. "If we were back a few hundred years, we'd get you burnt for a witch."
"Oh no, Alexander; the real witches were never burnt, or where was their witchcraft?"
"Well, if he goes off another time, you can magic him over a precipice."
"Hush!" Edward Webb hissed nervously. No one heeded him.
"If you want that done, you can use your own hands to it. Then you'll be hanged. But that'll not happen. I can't see that. Did they never tell you about the black dog?"
Edward Webb's face was illumined. "That's the world's rule," he said.
He made his courteous inclination of acknowledgment. "Not the world's," he agreed.
"I'm lost," said Alexander, looking from one to the other.
"That's the dog's fault," she teased him.
He laughed through his annoyance. "Oh, be quiet! Janet, put some more wood on the fire ready for when we've done, and we'll have the candle out."
"I'll tell it now. I was walking on a green path and I met a man. The dream wouldn't let me see his face, but he was a big man, and in each hand he had a bird. 'Will you give them to me?' I said, for I didn't like to see them caught; but when he held them out to me, I couldn't take them. He said: 'They're larks, but I can't get them to fly.' 'They're sparrows,' I said, and so they were. 'No,' he said; 'for they've got wings.' We didn't seem to be getting much sense out of each other, so I went on; but in a minute I heard a beating sound, and I looked, and the birds had flown, and they'd grown as big as eagles, but the man had fallen down. It was as if their flight had overthrown him. And I ran to him, but he'd gone, and I kept calling, 'Edward Webb, Edward Webb'--for I knew it was him; but he'd gone, and I never saw his face; but, for all that, I knew what he was like. And now, go home, Alexander."
"All right, then. Good-night. That's a good dream."
The large, stone-floored kitchen, with its shadowy corners, was a lonely place to Edward Webb when he had gone. It had the feeling of a vault and this woman might have been a carved figure, keeping the door; for she sat quite still and looked on the ground; but, without warning, she began to speak in a rising murmur.