It was that same night, as they were sauntering home from a starlight ramble, that they came on Johnnie Vautrin crouched in the hedge with Marielihou, and Marielihou had her hind leg bound up in a piece of white rag.

"Hello, Johnnie! What\'s the matter with Marielihou?" asked Graeme. And Marielihou turned her malevolent yellow-green eyes on him and looked curses.

"Goderabetin! She\'ve got hurt."

"Oh! How was that?"

"I d\'n know. Wisht I knowed who done it;" and just then, as luck would have it, old Tom Hamon came sauntering along in the gloaming, smoking a contemplative pipe with long slow puffs.

And at sight of him Marielihou ruffled and swelled to twice her size, and raked up most horrible and blood-curdling oaths from away down in her inside into her black throat, and spat them out at him, as he came up, in a fusillade that sounded like ripraps, and her eyes flamed baleful fires.

"Cuss away, y\'ould witch!" said old Tom, with a grin through his pipe-stem. "How\'s the leg?" and Marielihou with a final volley disappeared among the bushes, and Johnnie crawled after her.

"What on earth does he mean?" whispered Meg.

"Mr. Hamon has an idea that Marielihou and old Mme. Vautrin have something in common. In fact I believe he goes so far as to say that they are one and the same. Black magic, you know,&............