od. He had retired very late the previous night, and
his lack-lustre eyes showed the effect of insufficient sleep. His
single fellow-boarder, Mr. Pinkham, had not returned from his
customary early walk, and only Richard and Mrs. Spooner, the
landlady, were at table. The former was in the act of lifting the
coffee-cup to his lips, when the school-master burst excitedly into
the room.

"Old Mr. Shackford is dead!" he exclaimed, dropping into a chair
near the door. "There's a report down in the village that he has been
murdered. I don't know if it is true.... God forgive my
abruptness! I didn't think!" and Mr. Pinkham turned an apologetic
face towards Richard, who sat there deathly pale, holding the cup
rigidly within an inch or two of his lip, and staring blankly into
space like a statue.

"I--I ought to have reflected," murmured the school-master,
covered with confusion at his maladroitness. "It was very
reprehensible in Craggie to make such an announcement to me so
suddenly, on a street corner. I--I was quite upset by it."

Richard pushed back his chair without replying, and passed into
the hall, where he encountered a messenger from Mr. Slocum,
confirming Mr. Pinkham's intelligence, but supplementing it with the
rumor that Lemuel Shackford had committed suicide.

Richard caught up his hat from a table, and hurried to Welch's
Court. Before reaching the house he had somewhat recovered his
outward composure; but he was still pale and internally much
agitated, for he had received a great shock, as Lawyer Perkins
afterwards observed to Mr. Ward in the reading-room of the tavern.
Both these gentlemen were present when Richard arrived, as were also
several of the immediate neighbors and two constables. The latter
were guarding the door against the crowd, which had already begun to
collect in the front yard.

A knot of carpenters, with their tool-boxes on their shoulders,
had halted at the garden gate on their way to Bishop's new stables,
and were glancing curiously at the unpainted facade of the house,
which seemed to have taken on a remote, bewildered expression, as if
it had an inarticulate sense of the horror within. The men ceased
their whispered conversation as Richard approached, and respectfully
moved aside to let him pass.

Nothing had been changed in the cheerless room on the ground
floor, with its veneered mahogany furniture and its yellowish leprous
wall-paper, peeling off at the seams here and there. A ca