“Benjamin Stansfield,” recited the clerk, seated below the judge, “you are charged for that you—feloniously and fraudulently—” A rumble of words. “How say you, Benjamin Stansfield: are you guilty, or not guilty?”
“Guilty!” he replied.
IV—SLOW RECOVERY
Mrs. Marchant offered a pointed remark concerning the indolent habits of London folk as compared with the early rising and the continuous industry shown by people living in the country. Called by a boy who required a weekly journal, she, without leaving the pavement, instructed him to look over the contents of the counter and help himself, adding a warning that sweets were not to be touched.
“I don’t want to miss nothin’,” she remarked.
Her neighbour, absorbed in the subject previously under discussion, replied to the effect that there was not so much going on in Hayford that one could afford to evade incident.
“I see her blind move,” screamed a small child excitedly. “I did! I see it move, quite plain.”
Her elders were giving reproof, and pointing out the risks incurred by children who told stories, when the green venetians of the first-floor room at the Windmill Inn went up. Interest in the one street of the village at once reawakened. A message was sent to the forge, and Sprules, the blacksmith, strolled out, drinking tea from a saucer. A tall girl stepped from the porch of the inn and whistled several times, called the word “Fuzzy!” in varying tones of insistence and appeal. Banks, the young grocer and draper, peered through his window over columns of flannel, and then came to the doorway, where, acknowledging her salutation, he bowed and blushed.
“Morning, everybody,” she said. “Any news? Has any one—”
“He’s been seen again, miss,” remarked Sprules, setting down his saucer on a windowsill, and advancing with respect. “Old Joe Baldwin were up at four this morning, and he caught sight of your dog; somewheres, so far as I understand him, away in that direction.” Sprules gave a vague flourish of his bare arm. “Consequently, you can take it from me that he ent left the neighbourhood up to the present.”