“Since yesterday, sir. Mr. Thomas was determined he’d have everything right before you came back.”
“And how long have you been using that water,” pointing to the well, with its moss-grown brickwork and flaunting margin of yellow stonecrop, “for dairy purposes?”
“Well, you see, sir, we was obliged to use water of some kind; and there ain’t purer or better water than that for twenty mile round. I always use it for my kettle every time I make tea for me or my master, and never found no harm from it in the last fifteen years.”
“How long have you used it for the dairy?” repeated George Greswold angrily; “can’t you give a straight answer, woman?”
Mrs. Wadman could not: had never achieved a direct reply to a plain question within the memory of man.
“The men was to have come on the Monday morning, first thing,” she said, “and they didn’t come till the Tuesday week after that, and then they was that slow——”
George Greswold walked up and down the garden path, raging.
“She won’t answer!” he cried. “Was it a week—a fortnight—three weeks ago that you began to use that water for your dairy?” he asked sternly; and gradually he and the doctor induced her to acknowledge that the garden well had been in use for the dairy nearly three weeks before yesterday.
“Then that is enough to account for everything,” said Dr. Porter. “First there is filtration of manure through a gravelly soil—inevitable—and next there is something worse. She had her sister here from Salisbury—six weeks ago—down with typhoid fever three days after she came—brought it from Salisbury.”
“Yes, yes—I remember. You told me there was no danger of infection.”