“Died!” gasped the lady; “then what was the Jew with the beard doing in her house?”
“The Jew with the beard?” asked her husband. “I was there to-day and didn’t hear of anyone.”
“Are you sure?” cried the Countess.
“Quite!” said the Earl, “but wait! Is it perhaps the tramp that the Vicar saw in the churchyard and poor Geordie Brown’s ‘lighted man’? I think myself that in both cases it was just imagination.”
“Perhaps,” replied the lady after a long pause, “but all the same I shall resign my chairmanship of the branch of the Poor Lost Things.”
“Now what in the name of God——,” began the Earl.
“Hush,” almost screamed his wife.