Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/199

 broken figure on the stones was one to call forth only pity.

"Yes," assented the old Irishman meekly, "I know better and the priest is always telling me so. But yet—when there's trouble to them you love and seemingly no way out of it, why, you look back at the old fancies and wonder if they were not true after all, and you feel the need to try this thing or to try that thing, just in case there might be help in it."

"And what were you doing here? " David asked.

"It is on this house that the ill luck lies, for it was in its burning that the evil fortune began and it is only through its building up again that happiness can come back to Miss Miranda. And so—and so—just to make the luck change, it is the old way to take a candle in your hand and to walk through every part of the house saying spells as you go. And the last of the spells must be said in the hour before midnight in the dark of the moon. But Miss Betsey stopped me," he concluded regretfully. "This was to be the last night, yet I did not get the whole of the way."

"She came just in time," David corrected him. "The walls beyond here are weaker even than these, and high enough to bury you completely if they should fall. I was awake and heard the gate swinging, and I was trying to think how it came to be