A Fragment of Life
some unknown tongue that few men have ever heard on earth.
The women glared at one another with horror in their eyes, and he saw one or two of the oldest of them clumsily making an old sign upon their breasts. Then they began to speak again, and he remembered fragments of their talk.
'She has been up there,' said one, pointing vaguely over her shoulder.
'She'd never know the way,' answered another. 'They be all gone that went there.'
'There be nought there in these days.'
'How can you tell that, Gwenllian? 'Tis not for us to say that.'
'My great-grandmother did know some that had been there,' said a very old woman. 'She told me how they was taken afterwards.'
And then his uncle appeared at the door, and they went their way as they had come. Edward Darnell never heard any more of it, nor whether the girl died or recovered from her strange attack; but the scene had haunted his mind in boyhood, and now the recollection of it came to him with a certain note of warning, as a symbol of dangers that might be in the way.
It would be impossible to carry on the history of Edward Darnell and of Mary his wife to a greater length, since from this point their legend is full of impossible events, and seems to put on the semblance of the stories of the Graal. It is certain, indeed, that in this world they changed their lives, like King Arthur, but this is a work which no chronicler has cared to describe with any
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