He was descending the stairs as he spoke the last sentence, delivered in loud tones, probably for the benefit of Miss Rebecca Jones.  And lest the intelligent Protestant reader should fear he is being introduced to unorthodox regions, it may be as well to mention that the “purgatory” in Mr. Jabez Gum’s kitchen consisted of an excavation, two feet square, under the hearth, covered with a grating through which the ashes and the small cinders fell; thereby enabling the economical housewife to throw the larger ones on the fire again.  Such wells or “purgatories,” as they are called, are common enough in the old-fashioned kitchens of certain English districts.

Mrs. Gum, ready now, had been about to follow her husband; but his suggestion—­that the girl was watching an opportunity to make acquaintance with their undesirable neighbour, Pike—­struck her motionless.

It seemed that she could never see this man without a shiver, or overcome the fright experienced when she first met him.  It was on a dark autumn night.  She was coming through the garden when she discerned, or thought she discerned, a light in the abandoned shed.  Thinking of fire, she hastily crossed the stile that divided their garden from the waste land, and ran to it.  There she was confronted by what she took to be a bear—­but a bear that could talk; for he gruffly asked her who she was and what she wanted.  A black-haired, black-browed man, with a pipe between his teeth, and one sinewy arm bared to the elbow.

How Mrs. Gum tore away and tumbled over the stile in her terror, and got home again, she never knew.  She supposed it to be a tramp, who had taken shelter there for the night; but finding to her dismay that the tramp stayed on, she had never overcome her fright from that hour to this.

Neither did her husband like the proximity of such a gentleman.  They caused securer bolts to be put on their doors—­for fastenings in small country places are not much thought about, people around being proverbially honest.  They also had their shutters altered.  The shutters to the windows, back and front, had holes in them in the form of a heart, such as you may have sometimes noticed.  Before the wild-looking man—­whose name came to be known as Pike—­had been in possession of the shed a fortnight, Jabez Gum had the holes in his shutters filled-in and painted over.  An additional security, said the neighbours:  but poor timid Mrs. Gum could not overcome that first fright, and the very mention of the man set her trembling and quaking.

Nothing more was said of the dream or the apparition, real or fancied, of Lord Hartledon:  Clerk Gum did not encourage the familiar handling of such topics in everyday life.  He breakfasted, devoted an hour to his own business in the little office, and then put on his coat to go out.  It was Friday morning.  On that day and on Wednesdays the church was open for baptisms, and it was the clerk’s custom to go over at ten o’clock and apprize the Rector of any notices he might have had.