“Poor Vernon! My poor brother!” murmured the vicar with a heavy sigh.
Then Ned, hugging himself and indulging in a knowing smile of satisfaction, heard the study window close.
He crept back into his little house by the way he had come, narrowly escaping the attentions of his hounds, which, having quickly finished the scanty meal the dry bones afforded them, seemed inclined to try, as more nourishing, the person of their master. He went indoors, armed himself with a plate of raw meat in one hand and a short whip in the other, and calling them into the house succeeded in shutting them up once more in the room they had previously occupied.
“Good dogs! good dogs!” he said, approvingly, as he stood at the crack of the door and watched them snarling over the food. “That’s nothing to the meal you shall have when you’ve hunted out the next lot of old bones I shall set you grubbing for.”
And with another grim chuckle as he closed the back door and gave a glance at the now deserted study window of the Vicarage, Ned Mitchell retired for the night with a light heart and a good conscience.
Next morning Ned was early on the watch, in spite of the fact that the wound in his leg gave him a good deal of pain. He saw the vicar go out a couple of hours earlier than usual; and instead of walking, as was his custom in the morning, he was on his cob. Ned nodded to him as he went by, and timed his absence by a ponderous gold watch which was with him night and day.
“An hour and twenty minutes,” he said to himself, as Mr. Brander returned at an ambling, clerical pace, and, meeting the nurse with his little son descending the hill for their morning walk, gave the boy a ride in front of him as far as the stables. “Yes, parson; just long enough to ride to St. Cuthbert’s, catch your brother before he started on his parish work, have a quarter of an hour’s chat—about the weather, let us say—and be back in time for your own morning walk.”
Perhaps Ned Mitchell’s shrewd face betrayed his suspicions; perhaps the wily vicar’s knowledge of men was greater than any that books on divinity could impart; for, seeing the colonist leaning as usual over his garden gate, his shrewd eyes lazily blinking in the spring sunshine, Mr. Brander nodded, wished him good-morning, and added, cheerfully—
“On the watch, eh?”
“Perhaps, vicar,” answered Ned, touching his hat, with a knowing twinkle in his eye.