Audrey

"Ecod, then!" said the other man. "You're on a wrong scent. 'Twas no dolt

that ran that day!"

The man who had touched her laughed. "'Facks, you are right, Tom! But I'd

ha' sworn 't was that brown girl. Go your ways on your errand for

'feyther'!" As he spoke, being of an amorous turn, he stooped from his

saddle and kissed her. Audrey, since she was at that time not Audrey at

all, but Joan, the smith's daughter, took the salute as stolidly as she

had spoken. The two men rode away, and the second said to the first: "A

Williamsburgh man told me that the girl who won the guinea could speak and

look like a born lady. Didn't ye hear the story of how she went to the

Governor's ball, all tricked out, dancing, and making people think she was

some fine dame from Maryland maybe? And the next day she was scored in

church before all the town. I don't know as they put a white sheet on her,

but they say 't was no more than her deserts."

Audrey, left standing in the sunny road, retook her own countenance,

rubbed her cheek where the man's lips had touched it, and trembled like a

leaf. She was frightened, both at the encounter and because she could

make herself so like Joan,--Joan who lived near the crossroads ordinary,

and who had been whipped at the Court House.

Late that afternoon she came upon two or three rude dwellings clustered

about a mill. A knot of men, the miller in the midst, stood and gazed at

the mill-stream. They wore an angry look; and Audrey passed them hastily

by. At the farthest house she paused to beg a piece of bread; but the

woman who came to the door frowned and roughly bade her begone, and a

child threw a stone at her. "One witch is enough to take the bread out of

poor folks' mouths!" cried the woman. "Be off, or I'll set the dogs on

ye!" The children ran after her as she hastened from the inhospitable

neighborhood. "'T is a young witch," they cried, "going to help the old

one swim to-night!" and a stone struck her, bruising her shoulder.

She began to run, and, fleet of foot as she was, soon distanced her

tormentors. When she slackened pace it was sunset, and she was faint with

hunger and desperately weary. From the road a bypath led to a small

clearing in a wood, with a slender spiral of smoke showing between the

trees. Audrey went that way, and came upon a crazy cabin whose door and

window were fast closed. In the unkempt garden rose an apple-tree, with

the red apples shriveling upon its boughs, and from the broken gate a line

of cedars, black and ragged, ran down to a piece of water, here ghastly

pale, there streaked like the sky above with angry crimson. The place was

very still, and the air felt cold. When no answer came to her first

knocking, Audrey beat upon the door; for she was suddenly afraid of the

road behind her, and of the doleful woods and the coming night.