"Mr. Arbuthnot," she replied, impressively, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."
CHAPTER XVIII
A STRANGE INTERVIEW
The sun had gone down behind a bank of angry, leaden-coloured clouds, which were fast spreading over the whole surface of the sky. Only here and there a stunted, half-grown, and leafless oak-tree stretched out its naked branches towards the darkening sky, and within a yard or two of me there was a miserable apology for a cottage.
No one, save they had known otherwise, would have taken it for anything but a cowshed of the rudest form. It was built of boards dipped in black tar, windowless, chimneyless, save for a hole in the roof through which a small piece of dilapidated stove piping had been thrust, and without the merest pretence of a garden. It stood, or rather leaned, against one side of a sharp slope in the moor, and fifty yards from the rude sheep-track which did duty as a road, and even in the daytime there was no other human habitation within sight, or any sign of one.
With my arm in the bridle of the Black Prince, I led him down the slope, and, grasping my riding-whip by the stock, knocked sharply at what I concluded to be the door. I heard the quick sound of a man's startled curse, and then there was a dead silence. I knocked again, but no one answered. Then I kicked at the loose planks till the place seemed as though it would tumble down like a pack of cards.
"What d'ye want?" a woman's shrill voice cried through the open chinks. "Who be you?"
"I want your husband," I answered.
"Well, he bean't here, 'e bean't coom home."
"It's a lie!" I shouted back. "Tell him I shall not go away until I have seen him, though I kick this place about your ears. Is he afraid? Tell him I am alone."