"I'm not one to pry into other people's affairs," she continued, "but your goings on are more than I can understand. All day long you sit with the Book upon your knee, and if a neighbour asks why you never pass the gate, or seemingly move a limb, it's the rheumatics you speak of. And yet last night your bed was never slept in, my man, and I begin to suspect other nights as well. What's it mean, eh?"
Richard Vont rose to his feet and opened the door.
"Just that," he answered harshly, pointing to it. "I'll not be spied on. Inch for inch and yard for yard, this cottage and garden are mine, I tell you—mine with dishonour, maybe, but mine. I'll have none around me that watches and frets because of the things that I choose to do. I'll lie out in the garden at nights, if I will, and not account to you, Mary Wells; or sleep on the floor, if it pleases me, and it's no concern of any one but mine. So back to the village gossips, if you will, and spread your tale. Maybe I'm a midnight robber and roam the countryside at night. It's my affair."
"A robber you're not, Richard Vont," was the somewhat dazed reply, "and that the world knows. And there's summut more that the world knows, too, and that is that since you came back from Americy, never have you set foot outside that gate. There's friends waiting for you at the village, and there's them as smokes their pipe at night in the alehouse, whose company 'd do you no harm, but for some reason of your own you live like a hermit. And yet—yet—"
"Go on, Mary," he said sturdily. "Finish it."
"It's the nights that are baffling," Mrs. Wells declared. "There's some of your clothes in the morning wrings with sweat. There's sometimes the look in your face at breakfast time as though you'd had a hard day's work and done more than was good for your strength."
"I'm no sleeper," he declared, "no sleeper at all. If I choose to walk in the garden, what business is it of yours, Mary, or of any one down in th' village? Answer me that, woman?"
"Every man, I suppose, may please himself," she conceded grudgingly, "but I don't hold with mysteries myself."
"Then you full well know," he replied, "how to escape from them. If they're too much for you, Mary, I've fended for myself before, and I can do it again."
Mrs. Wells snorted.