"Oh, oh;" the voice croaked. "It is you, is it? That disgusting man!... Go away out. Go away out."
Hesitating no longer, I caught open the door and, slamming it behind me, ran out into the garden, under the gigantic old sycamore, and so out at the open gate.
I found myself half up the village street before I stopped running. The local butcher was sitting in his shop reading a piece of newspaper by the light of a small oil-lamp. I crossed the road and enquired the way to the station. And after he had with minute and needless care directed me, I asked casually if Mr. Arthur Seaton still lived with his aunt at the big house just beyond the village. He poked his head in at the little parlour door.
"Here's a gentleman enquiring after young Mr. Seaton, Millie," he said. "He's dead, ain't he?"
"Why, yes, bless you," replied a cheerful voice from within. "Dead and buried these three months or more—young Mr. Seaton. And just before he was to be married, don't you remember, Bob?"
I saw a fair young woman's face peer over the muslin of the little door at me.
"Thank you," I replied, "then I go straight on?"
"That's it, sir; past the pond, bear up the hill a bit to the left, and then there's the station lights before your eyes."
We looked intelligently into each other's faces in the beam of the smoky lamp. But not one of the many questions in my mind could I put into words.
And again I paused irresolutely a few paces further on. It was not, I fancy, merely a foolish apprehension of what the raw-boned butcher might "think" that prevented my going back to see if I could find Seaton's grave in the benighted churchyard. There was precious little use in pottering about in the muddy dark merely to find where he was buried. And yet I felt a little uneasy. My rather horrible thought was that, so far as I was concerned—one of his esteemed few friends—he had never been much better than "buried" in my mind.