"Then you think that she has been murdered?" I questioned.

"Yes, I do think so, sir; else why should she speak in that way? And in church she always said that part of the Litany about being saved from battle, murder, and sudden death louder than any."

"There was no blood and no wound," muttered Giles, turning this speech over in his mind. "Frampton said he thought it was a fit. But come and draw your chair, in, sir. We're humble folk, but what we have is at your service."

"You're very kind folk," I said, obeying the invitation. "Frampton and Mrs. Faith would have tied me up and starved me."

"Ignorant people, sir, who don't know any better. Bread, sir? jam, sir? yes, sir."

He was really most polite for a greengrocer, and I grew to like him more and more, as I did his busy, bright-faced little wife. The supper was homely but very nourishing, and I drank tea and devoured bread and jam, until my hunger was quite satisfied. During the meal the husband and wife told me that Mrs. Caldershaw had kept the corner shop--so they called it--for the last five years, and had never been popular amongst her neighbours. It was believed that she had miserly tendencies and had much money tucked away in a stocking. Her age was sixty, but she was an active woman for her years and lived entirely alone. It seemed that she had been born in Mootley, but had been absent for many years out at service--so she said, although she spoke very little about her past. With her savings--again this was the story of Mrs. Caldershaw--she had returned to die in her native village and, for the sake of something to do, had opened the corner shop.

"Did she have many callers?" I asked, mentally noting details.

"She never said so," remarked Mrs. Giles, who being somewhat of a gossip took the lead in the conversation. "She was a close one, she was. And the shop being round the corner, sir, we"--I presume she meant herself and the other gossips--"could never see who came or went. She lived quite outside our lives, sir, owing to the position of the shop and her own way of keeping to herself. Once she did say she'd never die in her bed, and that's what makes me think as she may have been done away with. But I never knew, Sam, that she'd a glass eye."

"I didn't know either," said Sam, who was devouring huge slices of bread and butter. "She told Mrs. Faith, though. I've seen her heaps of times, but I never spotted that one 

 Prev. P 22/233 next