t of cover in the hedge, and found
she could see him quite well, though she scratched her face terribly
with poking it into a rose bush. And in a minute or two out came the boy
from behind the hedge, and she saw uncle and him talking, and she knew
it was the same boy, as it wasn't dark enough to hide his flaming red
head. And uncle put out his hand as if to catch him, but he just darted
into the bushes and vanished. Aunt never said a word at the time, but
that night when they got home she charged uncle with what she'd seen and
asked him what it all meant. He was quite taken aback at first, and
stammered and stuttered and said a spy wasn't his notion of a good wife,
but at last he made her swear secrecy, and told her that he was a very
high Freemason, and that the boy was an emissary of the order who
brought him messages of the greatest importance. But aunt didn't believe
a word of it, as an uncle of hers was a mason, and he never behaved like
that. It was then she began to be afraid that it was really Anarchists,
or something of the kind, and every time the bell rang she thought that
uncle had been found out, and the police had come for him.'

'What nonsense! As if a man with house property would be an Anarchist.'

'Well, she could see there must be some horrible secret, and she didn't
know what else to think. And then she began to have the things through
the post.'

'Things through the post! What do you mean by that?'

'All sorts of things; bits of broken bottle-glass, packed carefully as
if it were jewellery; parcels that unrolled and unrolled worse than
Chinese boxes, and then had "cat" in large letters when you came to the
middle; old artificial teeth, a cake of red paint, and at last
cockroaches.'

'Cockroaches by post! Stuff and nonsense; your aunt's mad.'

'Edward, she showed me the box; it was made to hold cigarettes, and
there were three dead cockroaches inside. And when she found a box of
exactly the same kind, half-full of cigarettes, in uncle's great-coat
pocket, then her head began to turn again.'

Darnell groaned, and stirred uneasily in his chair, feeling that the
tale of Aunt Marian's domestic troubles was putting on the semblance of
an evil dream.

'Anything else?' he asked.

'My dear, I haven't repeated half the things poor aunt told me this
afternoon. There was the night she thought she saw a ghost in the
shrubbery. She was anxious about some chickens that were just due to
hatch out, so she