"Thank you, Mr. Barford," said Dorothy sternly. "I am able to take care of myself. There is nothing to fear."
"Nothing to fear," repeated Joe, lifting his hand with a gesture of astonishment. "Why, lass, the place is haunted. Did'st never hear that?"
"Yes, wi' her precious mother's ghost," sneered Letty. "Like mother, like child."
Dorothy started. She cast upon the speaker a look of ineffable contempt, and left the house without a word of parting to its inhabitants, never stopping for a moment till she gained the high road. "Good heavens!" she cried, when once more alone, and beneath the wide canopy of the night, "are these people fiends, that they rejoice in the supposition of my guilt, and condemn me on mere hearsay, without the least proof that I have committed this great sin?
"Is this human nature, of the wickedness of which I have heard so much, and which I found so hard to believe. I will never trust to kind looks and flattering words again. I tried to serve these people to the best of my ability; they all seemed pleased with me and spoke me fair, yet the first breath of evil that assails my character has turned them into bitter enemies. If this be life, how much better to--!" The rest of the unspoken sentence her better reason silenced.
This was only one of the many hard lessons people learn in the world. Dorothy was as yet a novice to the world and its crooked paths, and she felt indignant at the sorry treatment she had received from it during the past few weeks.
Dorothy walked on at a rapid pace for upwards of an hour: the night had now fairly closed in upon her; the moon shone bright, and the air was warm and balmy, but the road was long and lonely; not one solitary cottage was to be found beside her path, after she turned into the upland road that led across the heath.
People of limited education, born and brought up in out of the way country places, are apt to be superstitious. Dorothy was not above the common weakness of her class. Ghost stories, dreams and presentiments, not to say anything of bewitchments and distempers, caused by the withering glance of the evil eye, were subjects that generally formed the topic of conversation round the winter hearth, and were devoutly believed as truths, by the simple narrators, who derived from them an inexhaustible fund of amusement.