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Garth gave her son a quick glance. "It's like they're still at Fornside. I must see to 'em again." The blacksmith responded eagerly, "Do, mother, do." There was another pause. Joe made some pretence of scraping a file which he had picked up from a bench. "Thou hasn't found out if old Angus made a will?" said Mrs. Garth. "No." "No, of course not," said Mrs. Garth, with a curl of the lip.
Garth's visit to the deserted cottage at Fornside. There were perhaps twenty keys in all, but two only bore any signs of recent or frequent use. One of these was marked with a cross scratched roughly on the flat of the ring. The other had a piece of white tape wrapped about the shaft. The rest of the keys were worn red with thick encrustation of rust.
She thought of the lonely cottage at Fornside, and of him who should live there. Ralph divined the thought that was written in her face. "Get him to come here if you can," he said. "He could help Willy with the farm." "He would not come," she said. "I'm afraid he would not." "Then neither will he return to Fornside.
At such times he would go off without warning, and be seen no more for days. Rotha knew that he had gone to his old haunts on the hill, for nothing induced him to return to his cottage at Fornside. No one went in pursuit of him. In a day or two he would come back and take up his occupation as if he had never been away.
"Innocence is a poor shield from death. It was either father or Ralph," replied Willy, "and for myself I care not which." Then at a calmer moment he repeated to her afresh the evidence of the young woman Rushton, whom she and her father had housed at Fornside. "You are sure she said 'fifty yards to the north of the bridge'?" interrupted Rotha.
Rotha was walking hurriedly down the lonnin that led from the house on the Moss. Laddie, the collie, had attached himself to her since Ralph's departure, and now he was running by her side. She was on her way to Fornside, but on no errand of which she was conscious. Willy Ray had not yet returned. Her father had not come back from his long journey. Where was Willy? Where was her father?
"It was bad manishment, my lad, to let the lass gang off agen with Sim to yon Fornside." Mattha is speaking with an insinuating smile. "Could ye not keep her here? Out upon tha for a good to nowt." Willy makes no reply to the weaver's banter. At that moment Rotha and her father are seen to enter the meadow by a gate at the lower end. Ralph steps forward and welcomes the new-comers.
He would set out early and return late, usually walking in the direction of Gaskarth. One day Wilson rose at daybreak, and putting a threshing-flail over his shoulder, said he would be away for a week. That week ensuing was a quiet one for the inmates of the cottage at Fornside.
The girls turned towards the Fornside Fell on an errand which both understood and neither needed to explain. "Do the words of a song ever torment you, Liza, rising up in your mind again and again, and refusing to go away?" "No why?" said Liza, simply. "Nothing only I can't get a song out of my head today. It comes back and back One lonely foot sounds on the keep, And that's the warder's tread."
Then getting up, glancing nervously at her son, lifting a knife from the table, creeping to the side of the bed and ripping a hole in the ticking, she drew out a soiled and crumpled paper. "Look you, lass, I took this frae the man's trunk when he lodged wi' yer father and yersel' at Fornside." It was a copy of the register of Joe's birth, showing that he was the son of a father unknown.
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