"Half a century ago," said the vicar reassuringly; "you won't mind that?"

"Not the least. A century ago would be romantic. If it was just the other
day, we should feel we ought to have got the farm cheaper. But half a
century doesn't matter. It's a mid-Victorian, just a plain, old-fashioned
murder. Who did it?"

The vicar opened his eyes a little. Miss Leighton was, he saw, a lady,
and perhaps clever. Her spectacles looked like it. No doubt she had been
at Oxford or Cambridge before going to Swanley? These educated women in
new professions were becoming a very pressing and common fact! As to the
murder, he explained that it had been just an ordinary poaching affair.
An old gamekeeper on the Shepherd estate had been attacked by a gang of
poachers in the winter of 1866. He had been shot in one of the woods, and
though mortally wounded had been able to drag himself to the outskirts of
the farm where his strength had failed him. He was found dead under the
cart-shed which backed on the stables, and the traces of blood on the
hill marked the stages of his struggle for life. Two men were suspected,
one of them a labourer on the Great End Farm; but there was no evidence.
The suspected labourer had gone to Canada the year after the murder, and
no one knew what had happened to him.

But having told the tale the vicar was again seized with compunction.

"I oughtn't to have told you--I really oughtn't; just on your settling
in--I hope you won't tell Miss Henderson?"

Janet's amused reply was interrupted by Rachel's entrance. The vicar
arose with eagerness to receive her. He was evidently attracted by his
new parishioners and anxious to make a good impression on them. Miss
Henderson's reception of the vicar, however, was far more guarded. The
easy friendliness of manner which had attracted the bailiff Hastings was,
at first at any rate, entirely absent. Her attitude was almost that of a
woman defending herself against possible intrusion, and Janet Leighton,
looking on, and occasionally sharing in the conversation, was surprised
by it, as indeed she was by so many things concerning Rachel now that
their acquaintance was deepening; surprised also, as though it were a new
thing, by her friend's good looks as she sat languidly chatting with the
vicar. Rachel had merely put on a blue overall above her land-worker's
dress. But her beautiful head, with its wealth of brown hair, and her
face, with its sensuous fulness of cheek and lip,