She paused, and put her head on one side, as if waiting for the prompter. "How does it go? 'She thought some spirit of the sky had done the bold mosstrooper wrong!'"
She paused again, and looked at me; the evening light shone on her spectacles, and made them impenetrable.
"Now I'm going to give you a piece of advice; "'And I'll not take it!' says Major Yeates, R.M.!"
I protested that I had said nothing of the kind. She prodded me in the knee with a goblin finger.
"Close that well! Put on the flagstone, and seal it down again!" She fumbled in her shawls, and pulled out a thin old gold chain. "Here's the seal, the same one that my father sealed it with at the time of the Famine!"
I said that I was ready to do anything that she told me, but it would be interesting to know why.
Mrs. Knox detached the seal from her chain, to which it was knotted by something that I darkly suspected to be a bit of bootlace. It was a cornelian seal, made in the grand manner; massively wrought, the gold smooth from age.
"I daresay you never heard of Major Apollo Riggs? He drove up to this house one fine day in a coach-and-four. Next day the coach-and-four drove away, but Major Apollo Riggs was not in it!"
"He found himself a success at Shreelane?" I suggested.
"Not so much with his host as his hostess!" returned Mrs. Knox portentously.