"Or any stranger about?" edged in Emily again, when the spigot was finally turned off and the waters of gossip had ceased to run.
"Do you know——" The bake-shop girl dimpled her cheek with her forefinger. It was a healthy cheek, but not beautiful. "Do you know, there has been the oddest peddler around here for the last three weeks?"
"Do tell me about him. What did he look like? A stranger?"
"Never passed this street before as long as I know and that's a good many years. He was a sunburnt sort of man, like all the peddlers (only I'd say homelier, if I wasn't a fright myself), and with crazy blue eyes. Always came in a green cart and sold vegetables, no, once potted plants. But how he would yodel. Why, he'd make you deaf. Ellen used to buy of him sometimes. Nobody else ever did, and it's my opinion when he left the Arnolds he used to whip up his horse and hurry right round the corner."
"Was this peddler here lately?"
"Not since Friday, the day before the fire; I'm positive."
"He wasn't here Saturday?"
"No, he wasn't. But I must say, peddler or no peddler, I don't believe Robert Floyd ever set that fire."
There was more that Senda Wesner believed and disbelieved—so much, indeed, that when Emily left her she had asked herself twice what a room full of Senda Wesners would be like. But she checked this uncharitable thought. The girl was good-hearted and her information about the peddler might prove a clew. After making a half-circuit of the house which was so familiar to her, for she had visited it often, she returned to her stippling pencil in the photograph gallery, pondering now upon the identity of the strange peddler, now upon the sad fate of Ellen Greeley, and oftenest of all on the lover who was spending his first day in the solitude of a felon's cell.