dard thanked him more by her looks than with any words she was
able to speak. But she was none the less truly grateful for his sympathy
and aid. She had a kind of blind reliance on him which made her feel that
since she had once confided her trouble and danger nothing more could
possibly be done. When he was gone, she sobbed with relief, as before she
had wept for fear; she was hysterical, unstrung, utterly unlike herself.

But as the vicar went up towards the Hall he felt that he had his hands
full, and he felt moreover an uneasy sensation which he could not have
explained. He was certainly no coward, but he had never been in such a
position before and he did not like it; there was an air of danger about,
an atmosphere which gave him a peculiarly unpleasant thrill from time to
time. He was not engaged upon an agreeable errand, and he had a vague
feeling, due, the scientists would have told him, to unconscious
ratiocination, which seemed to tell him that something was going to
happen. People who are very often in danger know that singular uneasiness
which warns them that all is not well; it is not like anything else that
can be felt. No one really knows its cause, unless it be true that the
mind sometimes reasons for itself without the consciousness of the body,
and communicates to the latter a spasmodic warning, the result of its
cogitations.

To say to the sturdy squire, "Beware of a man in a smock-frock, one
Goddard the forger, who means to murder you," seemed of itself simple
enough. But for the squire to distinguish this same Goddard from all
other men in smock-frocks was a less easy matter. The vicar, indeed,
could tell a strange face at a hundred yards, for he knew every man,
woman and child in his parish; but the squire's acquaintance was more
limited. Obviously, said Mr. Ambrose to himself, the squire's best course
would be to stay quietly at home until the danger was passed, and to pass
word to Policeman Gall to lay hands on any particularly seedy-looking
tramps he happened to see in the village. It was Gall's duty to do so in
any case, as he had been warned to be on the look-out. Mr. Ambrose
inwardly wondered where the man could be hiding. Billingsfield was not,
he believed, an easy place to hide in, for every ploughman knew his
fellow, and a new face was always an object of suspicion. Not a gipsy
tinker entered the village but what every one heard of it, and though
tramps came through from time to time, it w