“Well, sir,” said Ned, with great heartiness; “choose your own time.”
“Suppose, then, we say now?”
“Now it is, then.”
Ned removed his arm from the tombstone against which he had been leaning, and led the way out of the churchyard with alacrity.
“This place gives me the horrors towards night time,” he explained as, with unwonted civility, he opened the gate for the vicar to pass out first.
“Why, surely a man of your sound practical sense doesn’t believe in the ghosts and goblins that keep the ignorant out of churchyards at night?”
“No: but such things can be done in lonely churchyards, under cover of the popular horror. You agree with me there, vicar, don’t you?”
This pigheaded colonist would harp always upon the same string. As plainly as if he had mentioned the name, his tone intimated St. Cuthbert’s churchyard and the murder of a girl there by Vernon Brander. But the vicar was learning how to “take” him, and he assented at once. They crossed the little village green, under trees whose bare branches began now to show small tufts of delicate young leaves. There was a strip of garden in front of the cottage; it had little space for flowers, but was well filled with shrubs and evergreens, which grew close up to the lower windows and almost shut out all light from the tiny sitting-room on the left-hand side of the door. Ned Mitchell, leaving the path, forced his way through the evergreens, and, holding the branches apart with his hands, beckoned his companion to the window, before which the vicar perceived a couple of strong iron bars had been put up.
“Why,” said he, as he picked his way daintily over the moist mould, “is it a menagerie of wild beasts you have in there?”
“Something very like it,” answered Ned, as a couple of brute faces, with hanging jaws and bloodshot eyes, dashed up against the window, licking the dusty frames with long red tongues, and jostling each other with hungry eagerness. “Whoa!” cried Ned, as he pushed up the window, and stretching a fearless hand through the bars, stroked and patted their sleek heads with an assured strength and coolness which told them he was their master. “I must have the glass taken out of these panes—what there’s left of it—or my pets will be hurting themselves.”