‘And did you hear or see any more of her?’

‘No more, sir.’

Mrs. Crickett, temporary servant to Mr. Manston, said that in accordance with Mr. Manston’s orders, everything had been made comfortable in the house for Mrs. Manston’s expected return on Monday night.  Mr. Manston told her that himself and Mrs. Manston would be home late, not till between eleven and twelve o’clock, and that supper was to be ready.  Not expecting Mrs. Manston so early, she had gone out on a very important errand to Mrs. Leat the postmistress.

Mr. Manston deposed that in looking down the columns of Bradshaw he had mistaken the time of the train’s arrival, and hence was not at the station when she came.  The broken watch produced was his wife’s—­he knew it by a scratch on the inner plate, and by other signs.  The bunch of keys belonged to her:  two of them fitted the locks of her two boxes.

Mr. Flooks, agent to Lord Claydonfield at Chettlewood, said that Mr. Manston had pleaded as his excuse for leaving him rather early in the evening after their day’s business had been settled, that he was going to meet his wife at Carriford Road Station, where she was coming by the last train that night.

The surgeon said that the remains were those of a human being.  The small fragment seemed a portion of one of the lumbar vertebrae—­the other the head of the os femoris—­but they were both so far gone that it was impossible to say definitely whether they belonged to the body of a male or female.  There was no moral doubt that they were a woman’s.  He did not believe that death resulted from burning by fire.  He thought she was crushed by the fall of the west gable, which being of wood, as well as the floor, burnt after it had fallen, and consumed the body with it.

Two or three additional witnesses gave unimportant testimony.

The coroner summed up, and the jury without hesitation found that the deceased Mrs. Manston came by her death accidentally through the burning of the Three Tranters Inn.

3.  DECEMBER THE SECOND.  AFTERNOON

When Mr. Springrove came from the door of the Rising Sun at the end of the inquiry, Manston walked by his side as far as the stile to the park, a distance of about a stone’s-throw.

‘Ah, Mr. Springrove, this is a sad affair for everybody concerned.’

‘Everybody,’ said the old farmer, with deep sadness, ’’tis quite a misery to me.  I hardly know how I shall live through each day as it breaks.  I think of the words, “In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see."’ His voice became broken.

‘Ah—­true.  I read Deuteronomy myself,’ said Manston.

‘But my loss is as nothing to yours,’ the farmer continued.

’Nothing; but I can commiserate you.  I should be worse than unfeeling if I didn’t, although my own affliction is of so sad and solemn a kind.  Indeed my own loss makes me more keenly alive to yours, different in nature as it is.’