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"Better come along with me, Ham," I continued, kindly; for I felt that I could afford to be magnanimous; and I think one ought to be so, whether he can afford it or not. "I'm not going to Crofton's in this fix," said he. "I can help you out, if you like, Ham.
"I do 'ope you will excuse me coming up like this," she said again, and her queer Cockney voice sounded quite pleasantly in Enid Crofton's ears. "I've not got very long, and I've been 'ere since four o'clock." As she spoke she did not look at the pretty young lady sitting by the fire.
"Hold on a minute, Buck; I want to get a drink of water," said Ham, as we approached a spring by the roadside, half a mile before we reached Crofton's. I drew up the black horse, and he jumped out of the wagon. He did not drink more than a swallow; and I did not think he was very thirsty. "Go ahead!" said he, leaping into the rear of the wagon, behind the seat, where I had thrown the mail-bag.
"There, you are all right now," I added, when I had finished the job. "Jump into the wagon, and I will take you along to Crofton's." "You are up to some trick, Buck," said he, suspiciously. "No, I'm not. I'm not afraid of you. I don't hit a fellow over the head with a mail-bag," I replied, seating myself in the wagon again.
Timmy would have hotly resented being called cruel, and to animals he was most humane, yet somehow he had enjoyed Mrs. Crofton's terror the other night, and he was not unwilling to see a repetition of it. And so the three set out Timmy, Radmore, and Flick. Somehow it was a comfort to the grown-up man to have the child with him.
As he did so, he realised that it formed a key to the newspaper report he had just read, for Miss Pendarth's letter ran: My dear Janet, I am longing to talk over the enclosed with you. I was lately in Essex, and when we meet I will tell you all that was said and suspected there at the time of Colonel Crofton's death. Someone we wot of got off very lightly.
Crofton's second visit to Old Place. Timmy had given his mother his word of honour that Flick should not be released from the stable till their visitor had left. But no casuist ever realised more clearly than did Timothy Tosswill, the delicate distinctions which spread, web-like, between the spirit, and the letter, of a law.
She was not content to leave her real beauty of colouring and feature to take care of itself; her eye-brows were "touched up," and when she fancied herself to be "off colour" she would put on a suspicion of rouge. But what perhaps unduly irritated the mistress of Old Place were Mrs. Crofton's clothes!
And yet, what more natural than that her well-to-do, kind-hearted sister-in-law should wish to know how she, Enid, was now situated? Cecil Crofton's widow was not what ordinary people would have called a clever woman, but during the whole of her short life she had studied how to please, cajole, and yes deceive, the men and women about her.
Radmore peered at the speaker: a thin, medium-sized woman she seemed to be; obviously not one of the country folk by her accent a Londoner. "Go straight on, and in about a quarter of an hour, you'll find The Trellis House on your right. But you'd better enquire as soon as you get into the village itself. Is it Mrs. Crofton's house that you want to find?"
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