“Oh, Hollow Grange—yes! I know where Hollow Grange is, but I was unaware that it was reputed to be haunted.”
“Ah,” replied the other, pityingly, “you’re new to these parts; I see that the minute I set eyes on you. Maybe you was wounded in France, and you’re down here to get well, like?”
“Quite so. Your deductive reasoning is admirable.”
“Ah,” said the sage, chuckling with self-appreciation, “I ain’t lived in these here parts for nigh on seventy-five years without learning to use my eyes, I ain’t. For seventy-four years and seven months,” he added proudly, “I ain’t been outside this here county where I was born, and I can use my eyes, I can; I know a thing I do, when I see it. Maybe it was providence, as you might say, what brought you to the Threshers to-day.”
“Quite possibly,” Dillon admitted.
“He was just such another as you,” continued the old man with apparent irrelevance. “You don’t happen to be stopping at Hainingham Vicarage?”
“No,” replied Dillon.
“Ah! he was stopping at Hainingham Vicarage and he’d been wounded in France. How he got to know Dr. Kassimere I can’t tell you; not at parson’s, anyway. Parson won’t never speak to him. Only last Sunday week he preached agin him; not in so many words, but I could see his drift. He spoke about them heathen women livin’ on an island—sort of female Robinson Crusoes, I make ’em out, I do—as saves poor shipwrecked sailors from the sea and strangles of ’em ashore.”
Dillon glanced hard at the voluble old man.
“The sirens?” he suggested, conscious of a sudden hot surging about his heart.