“What do you think you deserve for locking the child in the house by himself?” asked the Squire, sternly.
“Everything that’ll come upon me through it,” readily acknowledged Hill. “I could cut my hands off now for having done it; but I never thought he’d be really frightened. It’s just as if his ghost had been haunting me ever since; I see him a-following of me everywhere.”
“His ghost!” exclaimed the Squire. “Do you suppose he is dead?”
“I don’t know,” said the man, passing his shaking hand across his damp forehead. “I wish to Heaven I had let him go off to his grandmother’s that same blessed night!”
“Then you wish me to understand, Hill, that you absolutely know nothing of where the boy may be?”
“Nothing at all, sir.”
“Don’t you think it might have been as well if you had told the truth from the first?” asked the Squire, rather sarcastically.
“Well, sir, one’s mind gets confused at times, and I thought of his mother. I could not be off seeing that if anything had happened, it lay on my shoulders for having left him alone, in there.”
Whether the Squire believed Hill could tell more, I don’t know. I did. As we went on to the school-house, the Pater kept silence. Miss Timmens was frightfully disappointed at the result, and said Hill was a shifty scoundrel.