The small Ardelia woman with the fleck of colour at her collar bobbed forward. “If he can’t say it, I’ll say it for him. Sometimes he does believe, and sometimes he doesn’t. Now, Saul Morgan, say if ’tisn’t so.”
The stableman gave her a critical glare, but assented. “That’s nigh the way of it, as Miss Lacy says, sir.”
“Well!” snorted the interlocutor. “Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t! And what causes these changes of front?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“What makes you believe—”
“Well, sir, sometimes it’s right dark outside, you understand, and things or somethin’ you can’t see—well, they—”
“What, the things you can’t see?”
“Yes, sir. They have a way of surely creepin’ in your blood, if you understand what I mean, sir.”
“Yes,” said Pendleton, settling back, and, I thought, shivering a little, “I suppose I do.”
Morgan, on account of his complete and ingenuous exegesis of the lore of Parson Lolly, the object of much ironic commiseration from the “Londoners,” pulled out a florid handkerchief and wiped the beads from his brow. He stole a half-ashamed glance at the diminutive Ardelia Lacy, whose wide disapproving eyes made him squirm and shrink.