Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/213

 "Haith! ye wa' mistaken, lassie—ye wa' thinkin' of ither things."

"No, I could not be mistaken—I heard it plainly. You will see I was not mistaken, for as I looked over across the street (I could not help doing that, of course, hearing my own name spoken out so), there stood two women, and one of them was one of those dreadful, lying accusers."

The sensitive young girl stopped and shuddered; her naturally clear mind had doubted the charge of witchcraft—even when its victims had been vagrants of a more than questionable reputation. But when the awful charge had been brought against her own old friend, whose true and consistent piety and excellence she had intimately known and admired, the whole baseness and falsity of the charge seemed to stand out in bold prominence to her, and she hesitated not to deny the whole thing as an imposture; the cruel injustice of her doom, so opposed to all law, human or divine, which reached out hands eager to secure the victim, had outraged her feelings, and she looked upon the cruel accusers as murderers of her friend.