"Now, that's odd, sir," said Peter Smith, "very odd."
"I tell you what," said Thomas Bodkin, the sexton, with prodigious wisdom, "he's fallen in love."
"He wasn't much that sort, Mr Bodkin," said Nancy, with a little sigh. It pleased her to imagine that her heart was broken.
"Damned silly," said old Canthrop. "Damned silly. Never tould his feyther."
"And the old man so cut up about it," said Peter Smith.
"Yes," said John. "Didn't get back to business for nearly a week."
"Ah, it's curious to think of him so far away," said Nancy. "Out there in Aljanda. That is, if he wasn't killed in the row."
"Ah, if...." said the sexton ominously.
The Daily Mail had contained one day a few months ago a small paragraph which had caused quite an excitement in the village of Blaindon, reporting "considerable fermentation in the little State of Alsander." But the succeeding numbers had no further information on the subject, being well stocked with letters answering the grave question "Is the stage immoral?" which the great paper had proposed to itself with typical earnestness and audacity. The inhabitants of Blaindon, however, were not deterred by the meagreness of the data from an almost daily discussion as to whether their fellow townsman had perished.
"You cheer up, Nancy," said John Oggs, who was the sexton's opponent in the controversy. "Price is all right, and he'll turn up again one of these days, all boiled yellow by the sun."