I glanced at him while helping myself to strawberries and cream.  He sat nervously folding and refolding the napkin on his knee.  By-and-by he spoke, but without looking at me.

“I lost my temper this afternoon, and I beg your pardon, my boy.”

I began to stammer my contrition for having offended him:  but he cut me short with a wave of the hand.  “The fact is,” he explained, “I was worried by something quite different.”

“By John Emmet’s death,” I suggested.  He nodded, and looked at me queerly while he poured out a glass of Tarragona.

“He was my gardener years ago, before he set up market-gardening on his own account.”

“That’s queer too,” said I.

“What’s queer?” He asked it sharply.

“Why, to find a gardener cox’n of a life-boat.”

“He followed the sea in early life.  But I’ll tell you what is queer, and that’s his last wish.  His particular desire was that I, and I alone, should screw down the coffin.  He had Trudgeon the carpenter up to measure him, and begged this of me in Trudgeon’s presence and the doctor’s.  What’s more, I consented.”

“That’s jolly unpleasant,” was my comment, for lack of a better.

The Vicar sat silent for a while, staring across the lawn, while I watched a spider which had let itself down from a branch overhead and was casting anchor on the decanter’s rim.  With his next question he seemed to have changed the subject.

“Where do you keep your boat now?”

“Renatus Warne has been putting in a new strake and painting her.  I shall have her down on the beach to-morrow.”

“Ah, so that’s it?  I cast my eye over the beach this afternoon and couldn’t see her.  You haven’t been trying for the conger lately.”

“We’ll have a try to-morrow evening if you’ll come, Sir.  I wish you would.”

The Vicar, though he seldom found time for the sport, was a famous fisherman.  He shook his head; and then, leaning an arm on the table, gazed at me with sudden seriousness.

“Look here:  could you make it convenient to go fishing for conger this next night or two—­and to go alone?”

I saw that he had something more to say, and waited.

“The fact is,” he went on after a glance towards the house, “I have a ticklish job to carry through—­the queerest in all my experience; and unfortunately I want help as well as secrecy.  After some perplexity I’ve resolved to ask you:  because, upon my word, you’re the only person I can ask.  That doesn’t sound flattering—­eh?  But it isn’t your fitness I doubt, or your nerve.  I’ve hesitated because it isn’t fair to drag you into an affair which, I must warn you, runs counter to the law in a small way.”

I let out a low whistle.  “A smuggling job?” I suggested.

“Good Heavens, boy!  What do you take me for?”

“I beg your pardon, then.  But when you talk of a row-boat—­at night—­a job that wants secrecy—­breaking the law—­”