the flower-beds where he assumed the gardener would find it early in the morning, was pulling the sheet up past his chin and wiping the perspiration off his face with it.
V
Felicity had recognized Aubrey, although she realized that Jim Redsey, in full cry after the lad, had failed to do so. When all sounds of pursuit had died away, and Felicity’s fluttering heart had resumed its normal beating, she began to realize that she was alone in a large and terrifying wood, and that the hour was very late. Visions of a peaceful bedroom came to her.
‘But, before I go –’ she thought to herself.
The lineal descendant of Eve in Eden crept cautiously forward until she stood beside the hole which James Redsey had seen fit to dig. She peered into its depths and shuddered. To the daughter of the spiritual adviser to the parish, the six-foot hole presented the appearance of a freshly dug grave!
CHAPTER IV
I
MRS GEORGE WILLOWS was getting breakfast for the children. The day was Tuesday, the time ten minutes to eight and the temperature a pleasant sixty-five degrees in the shade. Mrs Willows was a small, anxious-looking woman who hovered round the half-dozen or so lusty young Willows as a foster-mother bird might hover round a nest full of young cuckoos.
The cottage would have filled the heart of an American motion-picture producer with unadulterated joy. It was thatched, it was floored with slabs of stone, and it had a small outside porch covered with pink rambler roses. A long narrow path led up to the door; on one side of the path a stretch of garden was devoted wholly to vegetables; on the other side blazed a bed of summer flowers. The cottage boasted four rooms and an out-house, for George Willows was no farm labourer; he was a gardener. Until the afternoon of June 15th he had been Rupert Sethleigh’s gardener. Since that day he had been Major Farquar’s gardener every afternoon, and general odd-job gardener to those who could afford him in the mornings and on Saturdays. At the moment when Mrs Willows was pushing Tommy Willows out of the front gate and latching it sternly behind him, and at the same time was admonishing George Willows, junior, who was showing signs of desiring to climb a tree in his best school shorts, her husband was putting a load of gravel down on the paths of the Cottage on the Hill, half-way between the village of Wandles Parva and the neighbouring town of Bossbury.
Mrs Willows waved to Emily Willows, who, with little Cissie Willows in tow, was about to turn the corner in the lane on the way to school, and then, with a sigh of gratitude to the powers that provide schools and teachers to come to the rescue of harassed parents, she retired to the kitchen to prepare breakfast for her husband. George was supposed to have done this job yesterday, but had not been able to procure the gravel and get it delivered at the Cottage until the late afternoon, when he was engaged at the major’s and could not spare time to deal with it. Therefore he had gone off at six o’clock that morning and hoped to be home to breakfast by nine.
Mrs Willows glanced at the clock, cut the rind off four rashers of bacon, laid two eggs beside them on the blue-ringed plate and placed the frying-pan ready to hand. This done, she changed the table-cloth for a freshly ironed one, walked out to the gate again, and, shading her eyes with her hand, looked down the sandy lane in order to catch the first glimpse of George, which should afford her the signal to dart into the kitchen and start cooking his food.
Far away, and very faint in the clear delicate air of the morning, she could detect the note of the school bell indicating to the tardy that the time was five minutes to nine. Soon the bell ceased. The bees began to hum. The hazy blue of the sky deepened and the sun’s warmth became more intense. Mrs Willows sighed. George had had nothing but a piece of bread and butter and a cup of tea before going out that morning. A man ought not to shovel and roll gravel with so little as that inside him, she felt sure. She sighed again, and longed for a cup of tea. She bent, and pulled a noxious silver-weed out from among the pansies. Then she went in again and glanced at the kitchen clock. It was twenty past nine.
At a quarter to eleven Willows came home.
‘I was getting that worried and upset, I nearly came to look for ’ee,’ volunteered his wife.
Willows, an affectionate but taciturn husband, seated himself in a chair, hitched it up to the table, and, having waited in silence while his wife placed two rashers and an egg on his plate and the same on her own, grunted, and attacked his food with appetite. Mrs Willows, who had carried on a losing fight for some years on the grounds of being compelled to eat two rashers and an egg for breakfast whether she wanted them or not, sighed for the third time and picked up her knife and fork.
After ten minutes of steady mastication, Mr Willows pushed aside his empty plate and reached for the cheese. Then he looked across at his wife, who was hesitating before the second rasher.
‘Well,’ he said, with the assumed ferocity of the self-conscious, affectionately disposed working man, ‘can’t ’ee say something, like?’
‘I don’t know as I got much to say, Geordie,’ replied Mrs Willows timidly. ‘Could ’ee eat up another bit o’ bacon if I put it on your plate?’
‘Now that’ll do from you, my gal!’ responded Mr Willows, eyeing her sternly. ‘You eat un up, and no nonsense! Here I feeds ’ee, day in, day out, as very few men feeds their wimmin-folk, I’ll lay, and that’s your gratitude! Where’d ’ee be now, I wonder, if I ’adn’t see ’ee et well, eh?’
‘In – in ’eaven, Geordie, I shouldn’t wonder,’ replied Mrs Willows, desperately anxious to give the answer which would placate him by coinciding with his own opinions.
Mr Willows snorted.
‘Then you et un up,’ he replied pithily.
‘Nice goings-on in the village last Sunday night, I ’ear,’ observed Mrs Willows tentatively, when, breakfast over, her husband prepared to settle down in the doorway with a pipe.
‘You’re right, my lass. There was. Who’s bin talking wi’ you about it?’
‘Oh, young Percy Noon was passing on his way to work and stopped to say thankee for them there young shallots. Said I’d tell when ’ee came ’ome. Percy says as how Squire Sethleigh’s gone off to the States sudden-like, and young Mr Wright, up where ’ee bin working this morning, is going off’s ’ead. Give I a turn, it did, to think of ’ee working there along. Percy did say as how he went clumping young Farmer Galloway over the head wi’ a hog- pudden in the bar of the “Queen’s Head”, and as how Galloway he took and give un the biggest thrashing out, and Bill Bondy, not liking to interfere, held the watch and see fair play. And Squire’s cousin, that young Mr Redsey, Percy do say, was lying dead drunk in the middle of it all.’
‘Well, that’s the news that was round the village yesterday,’ said Mr Willows. ‘There’s more to tell this morning. Made me late for my breakfast, going off along to know the truth of it.’
‘Well, there now! If I didn’t watch and wait at the gate, wondering what had come over ’ee at all to be so late for breakfast,’ said Mrs Willows.
‘Ah! Very likely ’ee did wonder. ’Ee’ll wonder more when I do be telling ’ee all. There’s bin a murder done at the butcher’s in the market down in Bossbury.’
‘A murder? Lawk a-massy I! ’Ee’ll sleep home to-night, Geordie, won’t ’ee?’
‘Happen I will. Nothing much doing at the major’s this afternoon. The roses can do wi’ a spray, for the green fly is mortal busy up along of ’em, and I set the lad to weed the gravel yesterday, so he can go on wi’ that again. The chrysants is coming on nice, and the strawberries looks a treat. But what ails you? You don’t want for company wi’ all the little ’uns in the ’ouse wi’ you!’
‘I be mortal feared o’ that there murder, Geordie!’
Mr Willows took the pipe out of his mouth and spat with accuracy and finality.
‘There won’t be any call for ’ee to be worriting, my lass,’ he observed. ‘Nobody don’t want to murder ’ee. Happen ’ee ’en’t important enough to be murdered. What’s that clock say?’
II
‘And what I say is,’ pronounced Mrs Eulalie Blenkins to the assembled meeting of mothers in the Chapel
