attempt to work. I had, of course, stolen out before six to
retrieve the stable key from the lavender bush, and hang it on its
accustomed nail. I looked into the stable first. My guest had departed.

I spent an idle morning musing on the events of the previous evening, if
time thus spent can be called idling. It may seem so to others, but in
my own experience these apparently profitless hours are often more
fruitful than those spent in belabouring the brain to a forced activity.
But then I have always preferred to remain, as the great Molinos
advises, a learner rather than a teacher in the school of life. Early in
the afternoon, as I was on my way to the post-office, my landlord, Mr.
Ledbury, met me. He looked excited, an open telegram in his hand.

"Have you heard about the escaped convict?" he said. "She has been
taken. She was traced to Bronsal Heath yesterday, and run to earth this
morning at Framlingham."

He turned and walked with me. He was too much taken up with the news to
notice how I started and how my colour changed. But indeed I flush and
turn pale at nothing. All my life it has been a vexation to me that a
chance word or allusion should bring the colour to my cheek.

"Poor soul!" he said. "I could almost wish she had made good her escape.
She got out, Heaven alone knows how, to see her child, which she had
heard was ill. But the ground she must have covered in the time! She was
absolutely dead beat when she was taken. And she was not in her prison
clothes. That is so inexplicable. How she got others she alone knows.
Some one must have befriended her, and given them to her--some one very
poor, for she was miserably clad, and the extraordinary thing is that
though she was traced to the deserted cottage on the heath yesterday,
and taken at Framlingham to-day, her prison clothes were found hidden in
my wood-yard, _here_ in my wood-yard, by Zack when he went to his work.
And this place is not on the way to Framlingham. How in the name of
fortune could she have hidden her clothes _here_?"

"She must have wandered here in the dark," I suggested.

"I don't understand it," he said, turning in at his own gate. "But
anyhow, the poor thing has been caught."

* * * * *

My story should end here. Indeed, to my mind it does end here. And if I
have been persuaded by my family to add a few more lines on the subject,
it is sorely against the grain and against my artistic sense. And I am