‘I can help you with the loading,’ said Mrs Tresize.  ’But tell me the worst of the danger, please.’

Doctor Unonius set the bag on the table, and unloaded its contents one by one while he told his story.  The sight of the money-bags did not produce quite the thrill he had looked for, but she evinced a lively interest in the paper pinned to the map.

‘Mrs Tresize at Landeweddy, 48,’ she read, holding it under the lamp, and slightly puckering her handsome brows.

‘That doesn’t flatter you, ma’am.’

‘Hey?’ Mrs Tresize looked up sharply.  ’You don’t suppose that means my age?’

‘I—­er—­fancied it might.  It would be a guess, of course.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Tresize.

‘It is nonsense,’ the doctor agreed.  ’The man was obviously misinformed.’

‘It doesn’t refer to my age at all,’ said Mrs Tresize, positively.  ’It—­it alludes to something quite different.  I was barely nineteen when I married.’

‘If you can guess to what it alludes—­’

‘Reported good money, but near—­’ read the widow, paused, and uttered a liquid laugh.  ’Oh, I am glad you showed me this.  We’ll punish him for that, doctor, if he dares to turn up.’

‘If,’ echoed the doctor, with a glance at the gun-racks.

‘I ought to go and warn Tryphena.’

‘Every moment may be precious,’ he agreed again, while she went to the chimney-place and fetched the now boiling kettle.

She mixed the drink and set it close before him, where he leaned pondering a pile of gold he had poured upon the table from one of the canvas bags.  The steam mounting from the glass bedimmed his spectacles.  He took them off to wipe them, and perceived that she was smiling.  She bit her lip at being thus caught.

‘I was thinking,’ she made haste to explain, ’what a funny situation ’twould be if by any chance the man was innocent, and you’d driven off with money that honestly belonged to him.’

’Honest men don’t put on women’s clothes to tramp the moors at night,’ Doctor Unonius objected.

’Well, I don’t see that it mightn’t happen.  A man having this money to carry, and afraid of being robbed, might put it to himself that rough characters—­specially gipsies—­often let a woman pass where they’d attack a man.  Or suppose, now, the man was a gipsy?—­he’d sold three horses, we’ll say, at Tregarrick Christmas Fair, and was trudging it back to his camp somewhere on the moors.  A gipsy would be the very man to hit on that kind of disguise, it being against his own principles to hurt any woman but his wife.’

‘This man was a butcher, ma’am, and no gipsy.’

‘O—­oh!’ cried the widow, with a little gasp.  ‘How do you know?’

’Never mind how I know, ma’am.  He was a butcher, right enough; and, on your hypothesis that I’ve committed highway robbery upon an innocent man, I’d like you to explain how he comes to be carrying about this paper.  “One large chest” he credits you with possessing; it is to be handled quickly and hidden in the orchard, if necessary—­ that is, I suppose, if he should be surprised; and to resist him you have nobody on the premises but your servant maid Tryphena.  For what innocent purpose, pray, does he carry about this memorandum?’