She scrambled over the wall and was in the meadow, which was knee-high with marguerite daisies. Crossing it, she was aware that for a few moments she was visible to anyone on the other side of the Green, but she hoped that they would be too much interested in the Baines’s cottage to spare a look in her direction. Soon she was on the path which she had followed with the children on that happy afternoon. There was the gateway. No gate now. Ed Woodly and Frank Revatt had lifted it and used it as stretcher. She shuddered.

It was a warm bright morning and on field and meadow the sun lay golden. In the wood it was cool and shadowy. Even the little clearing in which the Pond lay, though it was open to the sun, seemed chilly.

Puddler Pond was shrinking and its edges were drying out in plainly perceptible stages. There was an outer rim of cracked and wrinkled clay over which a thin veil of quick-growing weeds was already spreading; inside it lay another circle, bare and beginning to crack; and inside that a ring of moist mud. In this, there was a hollow depression at one point, and Miss Mayfield judged that there Wesley’s body had lain. When she looked more closely she could see traces of moist mud upon the dry circle and some of the greenstuff of the outermost circle broken; that was where Ed and Frank had dragged the body backwards. There were also several footprints, those nearest the pool’s edge beginning to fill with water.

It was all very much as one would have expected, and standing there, she wondered why, upon hearing the news, it had seemed so imperative that she should view the scene for herself. She still felt that the men had been wrong in removing the body and that the place should be guarded; those footprints, for instance, might be important. Among them there might be one which did not belong to Wesley, or to the two men who had found him. But her strongest feeling was the half-fearful certainty that if she looked hard enough and patiently enough, she would notice something which anyone else might miss, but which would be, to her, of great significance.