"Philemon, what has become of your guests? You've waited for them here until morning."
The old man with a dazed look surveyed the two plates set on either side of him and shook his head.
"James and John are getting proud," said he, "or they forget, they forget."
James and John. He must mean the Zabels, yet there were many others answering to these names in town. Mr. Sutherland made another effort.
"Philemon, where is your wife? I do not see any place set here for her!"
"Agatha's sick, Agatha's cross; she don't care for a poor old man like me."
"Agatha's dead and you know it," thundered back the constable, with ill-judged severity. "Who killed her? tell me that. Who killed her?"
A sudden quenching of the last spark of intelligence in the old man's eye was the dreadful effect of these words. Laughing with that strange gurgle which proclaims an utterly irresponsible mind, he cried:
"The pussy cat! It was the pussy cat. Who's killed? I'm not killed.
Let's go to Jericho."
Mr. Sutherland took him by the arm and led him up-stairs. Perhaps the sight of his dead wife would restore him. But he looked at her with the same indifference he showed to everything else.