rees and the mists be white on
the marshes and the sun set large and red and autumn would step down
quietly that night from the wold; and the next day the strange green
letter would come from China.

His fear of the three grim men and that secretive woman and their
lonely, secluded house, or else the cadaverous cold of the dying
season, rather braced Amuel when the time was come and he would step
out bolder upon the day that he feared than he had perhaps for weeks.
He longed on that day for a letter for the last house in the lane,
there he would dally and talk awhile and look on church-going faces
before his last tramp over the lonely wold to end at the dreaded door
of the queer grey house called wold-hut.

When he came to the door of wold-hut he would give the postman's knock
as though he came on ordinary rounds to a house of every day, although
no path led up to it, although the skins of weasels hung thickly from
upper windows.

And scarcely had his postman's knock rung through the dark of the
house when the eldest of the three grim men would always run to the
door. O, what a face had he. There was more slyness in it than ever
his beard could hide. He would put out a gristly hand; and into it
Amuel Sleggins would put the letter from China, and rejoice that his
duty was done, and would turn and stride away. And the fields lit up
before him, but, ominous, eager and low murmuring arose in the
wold-hut.

For seven years this was so and no harm had come to Sleggins, seven
times he had gone to wold-hut and as often come safely away; and then
he needs must marry. Perhaps because she was young, perhaps because
she was fair or because she had shapely ankles as she came one day
through the marshes among the milkmaid flowers shoeless in spring.
Less things than these have brought men to their ends and been the
nooses with which Fate snared them running. With marriage curiosity
entered his house, and one day as they walked with evening through the
meadows, one summer evening, she asked him of wold-hut where he only
went, and what the folks were like that no one else had seen. All this
he told her; and then she asked him of the green letter from China,
that came with autumn, and what the letter contained. He read to her
all the rules of the Inland Revenue, he told her he did not know, that
it was not right that he should know, he lectured her on the sin of
inquisitiveness, he quoted Parson, and in the end she said that