y match burned down....

"'Wait a minute--I've a _bougie_,' said Carroll, and struck the wax
match....

"There were the old sconces, with never a candle-end in them. There was
the large oval mirror, but hardly reflecting Carroll's match for the
dust on it. And the broken chairs were there, all gutless, and the
rickety old round table....

"But suddenly I darted forward. Something new and bright on the table
twinkled with the light of Carroll's match. The match went out, and by
the time Carroll had lighted another I had stopped. I wanted Rangon to
see what was on the table....

"'You'll see by my footprints how far from that table _I've_ been,' I
said. 'Will you pick it up?'

"And Rangon, stepping forward, picked up from the middle of the table--my
cigarette case."

* * * * *

Loder had finished. Nobody spoke. For quite a minute nobody spoke, and
then Loder himself broke the silence, turning to me.

"Make anything of it?" he said.

I lifted my eyebrows. "Only your _vigneron's_ explanation--" I began, but
stopped again, seeing that wouldn't do.

"_Any_body make anything of it?" said Loder, turning from one to another.

I gathered from Smith's face that he thought one thing might be made of
it--namely, that Loder had invented the whole tale. But even Smith
didn't speak.

"Were any English ladies ever found to have lived in the place--murdered,
you know--bodies found and all that?" young Marsham asked diffidently,
yearning for an obvious completeness.

"Not that we could ever learn," Loder replied. "We made inquiries
too.... So you all give it up? Well, so do I...."

And he rose. As he walked to the door, myself following him to get his
hat and stick, I heard him humming softly the lines--they are from
_Oft in the Stilly Night_--

"_I seem like one who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose guests are fled, whose garlands dead,
And all but he--departed!_"

THE ROCKER

I

There was little need for the swart gipsies to explain, as they stood
knee-deep in the snow round the bailiff of the Abbey Farm, what it
was that had sent them. The unbroken whiteness of the uplands told that,
and, even as they spoke, there came up the hill the dark figures of the
farm men with shovels, on their way to dig out the sheep. In the summer,
the bailiff would have been the first to call the gipsies vagabonds
and roost-robbers; now ... they had women with them too.