ng at all; but you've
given me an idea that certainly never crossed my mind before. I won't
say you've put the fear of God on me, Gilly, but you have put me in
rather a funk about old Nettleton! He is a rum 'un--I must admit it. If
he should have done anything that could possibly be traced to ... all
that.... I'll never open my mouth about it again."

"Oh, bless your life, it's only more servant troubles," I reassured him.
"I shouldn't wonder if old Sarah herself finds him more than she can
stick. They do say he assaulted that last girl, so that she could hardly
limp into her cab!"

Uvo rolled his head on the pillow.

"It wasn't an assault, Gilly. I know what happened to her. But I must
know what's happened to old Sarah, or to Nettleton himself. Will you
promise to come back and tell me?"

"Certainly."

"Then off you go, my dear fellow, and I'll hang on to my soul till you
get back. You may have to go along with her, if he's been doing anything
very mad. Take my key, and tell them downstairs not to lock you out."

Sarah was waiting for me on the front-door mat, but she refused to make
any communication before we left the house. She really was what she
herself would have described as an elderly party, though it is doubtful
whether even Sarah would have considered the epithet appropriate to her
years. She certainly wore a rather jaunty bonnet on her walks abroad. It
had a garish plume that nodded violently with her funny old head, and
simply danced with mystery as she signified the utter impossibility of
speech within reach of other ears.

"I'm very sorry to trouble you, sir, very," said the old lady, as she
trotted beside me up Mulcaster Park. "But I never did know such a thing
to 'appen before, and I don't like it, sir, not at all I don't, I'm
sure."

"But what has happened, Sarah?"

As a witness Sarah would not have been a success; she believed in
beginning her story very far back, in following it into every by-way and
blind alley of immaterial fact, in reporting every scrap of dialogue
that she could remember or improvise, and in eschewing the oblique
oration as an unworthy economy of time and breath. If interrupted, she
would invariably answer a question that had not been asked, and on
getting up to any real point she would shy at it like a fractious old
steed. It was then impossible to spur her on, and we had to retrace much
ground at her pleasure. The _ipsissima verba_ of this innocent creature
are ther