ith a startling grasp.

The fleeting light soon expired, and twilight was succeeded by the
early night.

The inn yard gradually became quiet; and the dead sexton lay alone, in
the dark, on his back, locked up in the old coach-house, the key of
which was safe in the pocket of Tom Scales, the trusty old hostler of
the George.

It was about eight o'clock, and the hostler, standing alone on the
road in the front of the open door of the George and Dragon, had just
smoked his pipe out. A bright moon hung in the frosty sky. The fells
rose from the opposite edge of the lake like phantom mountains. The
air was stirless. Through the boughs and sprays of the leafless elms
no sigh or motion, however hushed, was audible. Not a ripple glimmered
on the lake, which at one point only reflected the brilliant moon from
its dark blue expanse like burnished steel. The road that runs by the
inn door, along the margin of the lake, shone dazzlingly white.

White as ghosts, among the dark holly and juniper, stood the tall
piers of the Vicar's gate, and their great stone balls, like heads,
overlooking the same road, a few hundred yards up the lake, to the
left. The early little town of Golden Friars was quiet by this time.
Except for the townsfolk who were now collected in the kitchen of the
inn itself, no inhabitant was now outside his own threshold.

Tom Scales was thinking of turning in. He was beginning to fell a
little queer. He was thinking of the sexton, and could not get the
fixed features of the dead man out of his head, when he heard the
sharp though distant ring of a horse's hoof upon the frozen road.
Tom's instinct apprized him of the approach of a guest to the George
and Dragon. His experienced ear told him that the horseman was
approaching by the Dardale road, which, after crossing that wide and
dismal moss, passes the southern fells by Dunner Cleugh and finally
enters the town of Golden Friars by joining the Mardykes road, at the
edge of the lake, close to the gate of the Vicar's house.

A clump of tall trees stood at this point; but the moon shone full
upon the road and cast their shadow backward.

The hoofs were plainly coming at a gallop, with a hollow rattle. The
horseman was a long time in appearing. Tom wondered how he had heard
the sound--so sharply frosty as the air was--so very far away.

He was right in his guess. The visitor was coming over the mountainous
road from Dardale Moss; and he now saw a horseman, who