n the radius of a
few square miles.

When Alec Trenholme started off the third time to reproach the recreant
driver of the ox-cart, he had no intention of again dealing with him
directly. He bent his steps to the largest house in the neighbourhood,
the house of the family called Turrifs; whose present head, being the
second of his generation on the same farm, held a position of loosely
acknowledged pre-eminence. Turrif was a Frenchman, who had had one
Scotch forefather through whom his name had come. This, indeed, was the
case with many of his neighbours.

Trenholme had had various negotiations with this Turrif and his
neighbours, but he had only once been to the house he was now seeking
and in the darkness, which had fallen completely during his three-mile
walk, he was a little puzzled to find it quickly. Its wooden and
weather-greyed walls glimmered but faintly in the night; it was only by
following the line of log fences through the flat treeless fields that
he found himself at last full in the feeble rays of the candle-light
that peeped from its largest window. Trenholme knocked.

Turrif himself opened the door. He was a man of middle age, thick-set
but thin, with that curious grey shade on a healthy skin that so often
pertains to Frenchmen. For a moment his shrewd but mild countenance
peered into the darkness; then, holding wide the door and making welcome
motion with his hand, he bade Trenholme enter.

Trenholme could not speak French, but he knew that Turrif could
understand enough English to comprehend his errand if he told it slowly
and distinctly. Slowly and distinctly, therefore, he recounted all that
had befallen him since Saul arrived at the station; but such telling of
such a story could not be without some embarrassment, caused by the
growing perception, on the part of both men, of its extraordinary
nature.

"Eh--h!" said the Frenchman during the telling. It was a prolonged
syllable, denoting meditative astonishment, and it brought another
listener, for the wife came and stood by her husband, who interpreted
the story to her, and shortly a girl of thirteen also drew near and
stood listening to her father's interpretation. Trenholme began to
wonder whether the elder listeners were placing any confidence in his
word; but the doubt was probably in his mind only, for an honest man
does not estimate the subtle force of his own honesty.

Turrif and his wife listened to all that was said, and looked at ea