It was the day following the night of the exhumation, and market day in Grendon. On the high paved sidewalk there paced up and down, jostling one another, a crowd of men, though here and there a woman, a farmer’s wife or daughter, mingled in the throng.
And then all at once Garlett realized that as he stepped quickly along, people were pointing him out to one another, and that many of them were staring at him, some furtively, but the majority with an eager, pitiless stare of almost savage curiosity.
A boy selling the local daily, a small sheet called The Grendon News, came bounding along, and he could hardly hand the paper out quickly enough to those who had not already got it in their hand.
Harry Garlett called out: “Here, boy, I want that paper!” and at the sound of his harsh voice the men round him all fell silent, and stared at him with a more pitiless curiosity than before.
He took the paper, paid the boy, and held it out. Right across the little local sheet, in as big type as had been set out the declaration of war in August, 1914, ran the words “Exhumation of Mrs. Emily Garlett.”
He walked on, hardly knowing what he was doing, and yet horribly aware that his fellow townsmen and country neighbours were now forming a lane, leaving the way clear for him alone on the pavement.
Not a face smiled in greeting, not a hand was stretched out to him of the many hands there which had so often grasped his in kindly friendship, or in fervent admiration of his cricketing prowess.
At last he reached what he believed would be to him a place of refuge. But as he turned into the great square courtyard of the Etna China factory, he saw faces glued to every window-pane.
His coming had been heralded, and all these people with whom he had been on such happy, friendly terms till yesterday, were now staring at him as if he were some terrible wild beast.
But having gazed, as they hoped furtively, their fill, they melted quickly away from the windows. He was, after all, their employer, the master of their destinies, until——?