"Hold on," Nigel remonstrated. "Give me a chance to digest my dinner, and—dash it all, the thing's so deuced uncanny that it doesn't bear too much laughing at either!"
"Come along!" Six voices echoed the cry. "We're waiting, Nigel."
So Merriton had forthwith to oblige them. He, too, had had enough to drink—though drinking too heavily was not one of his vices—and his flushed face showed the excitement that burned within him.
"Come over here by the window and see the thing for yourselves, and then you shall hear the story," he began enigmatically.
Nigel pushed back the heavy curtain and there, in the darkness without—it was getting on toward ten o'clock—gleamed and danced and flickered the little flames that had so often puzzled him, and filled his soul with a strange sort of supernatural fear. Against the blackness beyond they hung like a chain of diamonds irregularly strung, flickering incessantly.
Every man there, save one, and that one stood apart from the others like some giant bull who deigns not to run with the herd—gave an involuntary exclamation.
"What a deuced pretty sight!" remarked Fordyce, in his pleasant drawl. "What is it? Some sort of fair or other? Didn't know you had such things in these parts."
"We don't." It was Merriton who spoke, rather curtly, for the remark sounded inane to his ears.
"It is no fair you ass, it's—God knows what! That's the point of the whole affair. What are those flames, and where do they come from? That part of the Fens is uninhabited, a boggy, marshy, ghostly spot which no one in the whole countryside will cross at night. The story goes that those who do—well they never come back."
"Oh, go easy, Nigel!" struck in Tony West with a whistle of pretended astonishment. "Champagne no doubt, but—"