the George, he had his liquor to himself, and in the midst
of the general talk was a saturnine listener. There was something
sinister in this man's face; and when things went wrong with him, he
could look dangerous enough.

There were whispered stories in Golden Friars about Toby Crooke.
Nobody could say how they got there. Nothing is more mysterious than
the spread of rumour. It is like a vial poured on the air. It travels,
like an epidemic, on the sightless currents of the atmosphere, or by
the laws of a telluric influence equally intangible. These stories
treated, though darkly, of the long period of his absence from his
native village; but they took no well-defined shape, and no one could
refer them to any authentic source.

The Vicar's charity was of the kind that thinketh no evil; and in such
cases he always insisted on proof. Crooke was, of course, undisturbed
in his office.

On the evening before the tragedy came to light--trifles are always
remembered after the catastrophe--a boy, returning along the margin of
the mere, passed him by seated on a prostrate trunk of a tree, under
the "bield" of a rock, counting silver money. His lean body and limbs
were bent together, his knees were up to his chin, and his long
fingers were telling the coins over hurriedly in the hollow of his
other hand. He glanced at the boy, as the old English saying is, like
"the devil looking over Lincoln." But a black and sour look from Mr.
Crooke, who never had a smile for a child nor a greeting for a
wayfarer, was nothing strange.

Toby Crooke lived in the grey stone house, cold and narrow, that
stands near the church porch, with the window of its staircase looking
out into the churchyard, where so much of his labour, for many a day,
had been expended. The greater part of this house was untenanted.

The old woman who was in charge of it slept in a settle-bed, among
broken stools, old sacks, rotten chests and other rattle-traps, in the
small room at the rear of the house, floored with tiles.

At what time of the night she could not tell, she awoke, and saw a
man, with his hat on, in her room. He had a candle in his hand, which
he shaded with his coat from her eye; his back was towards her, and he
was rummaging in the drawer in which she usually kept her money.

Having got her quarter's pension of two pounds that day, however, she
had placed it, folded in a rag, in the corner of her tea caddy, and
locked it up in the "eat-malison"