The travellers had not been gone very long as it seemed to Betty before the doctor rode up, and she was beginning to describe her mistress's symptoms, when he said,—
"Yes, yes, the boy told me she was very bad when he came this morning, but she always has a fit of the megrims about this time. Something worse has happened now, I'm afraid. Where is your mistress? She must get up, if she is in bed."
"Oh, doctor, what can you mean? You know how the poor thing suffers." And Betty began to cry; but the rough old doctor went straight upstairs and told Mrs. Tyler that her husband had been thrown from his gig and seriously hurt.
"I suppose it's only the megrims again that ails you," he added.
Whatever it might be, Mrs. Tyler was ready to help when they carried her husband upstairs and laid him on the bed; only the doctor told her he must see to him first, and sent for a neighbour to give him what help he needed. But somehow, before a word had been spoken as to what the doctor feared, the neighbours knew that the landlord of The Magpie would never walk up the village street again, and when at last the announcement was made that he was dead, men and women looked at each other, and with a sagacious nod whispered,—
"I told you so; I knew how it would be when he was so obstinate about keeping that limb of Satan about the stable."
"But the horse threw him out of the gig," said another, "and his head struck one of those great boulders in the road."
"Ah! But that boy was with him, and the horse that he had bewitched did all the mischief," said a friend of old Toby's, who strongly resented Eric's doctoring the horses.
"Well, now, I've just heard he's more of a Methodist than a witch," said another; "for my Jack caught him once kneeling down in the forest saying his prayers, which is just what they Methodys do, I have heard."
"Very likely; but where is the difference, pray, when they are both agin the Church and the parsons? At all events, here's the landlord of The Magpie goes out well and hearty with this lad, and soon afterwards the doctor comes along and finds him stone dead. It'll be a case for the coroner, and twelve of us 'll have to sit on the body. Now what are we going to say about that boy?"