“I dreamed of battle and murder and sudden death, my lady, with Sid in his cold grave playing on a harp, angel-like. Yes!” she folded her rusty shawl tightly round her spare form and nodded, “there was Sid, looking beautiful in his coffin, and cut into a hash, as you might say, with—”
“Ugh! ugh!” shuddered Lucy, and Archie strove to draw her away.
“With murder written all over his poor face,” pursued the widow. “And I woke up screeching with cramp in my legs and pains in my lungs, and beatings in my heart, and stiffness in my—”
“Oh, hang it, shut up!” shouted Archie, seeing that Lucy was growing pale at this ghoulish recital, “don't be fool, woman. Professor Braddock says that Bolton'll be back in three days with the mummy he has been sent to fetch from Malta. You have been having nightmare! Don't you see how you are frightening Miss Kendal?”
“'The Witch' of Endor, sir—”
“Deuce take the Witch of Endor and you also. There's a shilling. Go and drink yourself into a more cheery frame of mind.”
Widow Anne bit the shilling with one of her two remaining teeth, and dropped a curtsey.
“You're a good, kind gentleman,” she smirked, cheered at the idea of unlimited gin. “And when my boy Sid do come home a corpse, I hope you'll come to the funeral, sir.”
“What a raven!” said Lucy, as Widow Anne toddled away in the direction of the one public-house in Gartley village.
“I don't wonder that the late Mr. Bolton laid her out with a flat-iron. To slay such a woman would be meritorious.”