Mr. Rogers stared at her.

“An hour’s knockabout with me will do the child more good than moping in the house, and I ought to have thought of it myself.  Come along, Harry Brooks, and play me a match at single wicket.  Help me push away the catapult there into the corner.  Will you take first innings, or shall we toss?”

The catapult indicated by Miss Belcher was a formidable-looking engine with an iron arm or rod terminating in a spoon-shaped socket, and worked by a contrivance of crank and chain.  You placed your cricket-ball in the socket, and then, having wound up the crank and drawn a pin which released the machinery, had just time to run back and defend your wicket as the iron rod revolved and discharged the ball with a jerk.  The rod itself worked on a slide, and could be shortened or extended to vary the trajectory, and the exercise it entailed in one way and another had given Miss Belcher’s cheeks a fine healthy glow.

“Whew!” she exclaimed, tucking the bat under her arm and wiping her forehead with a loose end of her yellow bandana.  “I’m feelin’ like the lady in ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’; by which I don’t mean the one that stooped to folly, but the one that was all of a muck of sweat.”

“My dear Lydia,” gasped Mr. Rogers, “we haven’t come to play cricket!  Put down your bat and listen to me.  There’s the devil to pay in this parish of yours.  To begin with, we’ve found another body—­”

“Eh?  Where?”

“In the plantation under the slope here—­close beside the path, and about two gunshots off the lane.”

“What have you done with it?”

“Two of your fellows are fetching it along.  I was going to ask you as a favour to let it lie here for the time while we follow up the search.”

“Of course you may.  But who is it?”

“An old man in sea clothes.  Harry knows him; says he hails from Falmouth, and that his name is Coffin.  And we’ve arrested a young fellow on suspicion, though I begin to think he hasn’t much to do with it; but, as it happens, he comes from Falmouth too, and knows the deceased.”

Miss Belcher hitched an old riding-skirt off a peg and indued it over her red flannel petticoat, fastening it about her waist with a leathern strap and buckle.

“Well, the first thing is to fetch the body along, and then I’ll go down with you and have a look.”

“I’ve halted the men about a hundred yards down the hill.  I thought perhaps you’d step straight along with me to the house, so as to be out of the way when they—­But, anyhow, if you insist on coming, we can fetch across the cricket-field and down to the left, so that you needn’t meet it.”

“Bless the man!”—­Miss Belcher had turned to another peg, taken down a loose weather-stained gardening-jacket, and was slipping an arm into the sleeve—­“you don’t suppose, do you, that I’m the sort of person to be scared by a dead body?  Open the door, please, and lead the way.  This is a serious business, Jack, and I doubt if you have the head for it.”