“Lord bless you, as healthy as any place in the kingdom. There wasn’t one in ten as was ill when he died, as one may say.”
“But that scarcely seems an unmixed blessing,” commented the lady musingly, “to go off suddenly in the full flush of health and spirits; it would be so discouraging.”
“Most was chills, took sudden,” Dodge explained; “chills is wot chokes up yer churchyards for yer. If we has another hard winter this year, we shall have a job to find room in here. There’s one or two in the village already, as I has my eye on, wot——”
“Was this one a chill?” interrupted Mrs. Temperley, with a nod towards the new grave.
“Wot, this here? Lord bless you, no, mum. This here’s our schoolmarm. Didn’t you never hear tell about her?” This damning proof of his companion’s aloofness from village gossip seemed to paralyse the gravedigger.
“Why everybody’s been a talkin’ about it. Over varty, she war, and ought to ’a knowed better.”
“But, with advancing years, it is rare that people do get to know better—about dying,” Mrs. Temperley suggested, in defence of the deceased schoolmistress.
“I means about her conduc’,” Dodge explained; “scand’lous thing. Why, she’s been in Craddock school since she war a little chit o’ sixteen.”
“That seems to me a trifle dull, but scarcely scandalous,” Mrs. Temperley murmured.
“... And as steady and respectable a young woman as you’d wish to see ... pupil teacher she was, and she rose to be schoolmarm,” Dodge went on.