“But under the circumstances!” I repeated his phrase. “Morality is a question of local custom, isn’t it? The mores, you know.”
“Mores? Oh, you sound like Belvoir, who’s been getting everybody in a stew.” He overlooked his own introduction of the word.
“Well, I shan’t propose it, my dear man. I know that I should be mobbed, without a Welshman in the Vale to protect me.”
A flicker of movement crossed his features, and his voice was constrained, even grave. “Without a Welshman?—well, I don’t know.”
“You’re aggrieved, Crofts. What’s the matter?”
“This place is full of wild-eyed superstitions,” he declared, beginning to pace the length of the room. “We have a few Welsh servants—they keep the place up while it’s unoccupied—and they’re agog with the Gwyllion and the Tylwyth Teg. They’re stirring up the rest with tales of the haggish fairies and dwarfs and goblins that seem to infect this locality.”
“Well,” I laughed, yet with a pinch of queerness in thinking of the near-apparition who had occurred on the ledge-path, “as long as nobody has met his own funeral and the dames and peers of elfin-land keep outside the walls—”
“But that’s just it!” he cried vexatiously. “There’s been an invasion. The women have made me put all their best jewellery in the strong-box, and still they’re fretting.”
I paused in the act of drying my back. “You don’t mean—”
“The worst visitant of all is in our midst, and unless we dispose of him our nerves will be in tatters!” Then he lapsed into sudden contrition for his vehemence. “Of course I’m not such a fool as to believe any of it.”