e. It wore burnt right out, and all as was in it."

"Oh! How did it come to get burnt?"

"Can't say, sir, but I did hear say how as Lady Bellamy was a-dining
there last night along with the squire; the squire he went out
somewhere, my lady she goes home, and the footman he goes to put out
the lamp and finds the drawing-room a roaring fiery furnace, like as
parson tells us on. But I don't know how that can be, for I heard how
as the squire was a-dying, so 'taint likely that he was a-going out.
But, lord, sir, folk in these parts do lie that uncommon, 'taint as it
be when I was a boy. As like as no, he's no more dying than you are.
Anyhow, sir, it all burned like tinder, and the only thing, so I'm
told, as was saved was a naked stone statty of a girl with a chain
round her wrists, as Jim Blakes, our constable, being in liquor,
brought out in his arms, thinking how as it was alive, and tried to
rewive it with cold water."

At that moment Sam's story was interrupted by the arrival of a
farmer's cart.

"How be you, Sam?"

"Well, I thank yer, for seventy-two, that is, not particular ill."

"Have you a gentleman of the name of Heigham staying here?"

"I am he," said Arthur, "do you want me?"

"No, sir, only the station-master at Roxham asked me to drop this here
as it was marked immediate," and he handed Arthur a box.

Arthur thanked him, and, taking it, went up to his room, leaving old
Sam delighted to find a new listener to his story of the fire.

It was from the florist, and contained the bouquet he had meant to
give Angela on her wedding-day. It had cost him a good deal of thought
that bouquet, to say nothing of five guineas of the coin of the realm,
and he felt a certain curiosity to look at it, though to do so gave
him something of the same sensation that we experience in reading a
letter written by some loved hand which we know grew cold before the
lines it traced could reach us. He took the box to his room and opened
it. The bouquet was a lovely thing, and did credit even to Covent
Garden, and the masses of stephanois and orange-bloom, relieved here
and there by rising sprays of lilies-of-the-valley, filled the whole
room with fragrance.

He drew it from the zinc-well in which it was packed in moss and
cotton-wool, and wondered what he should do with it. He could not
leave such a thing about, nor would he take it away. Suddenly an idea
struck him, and he repacked it in its case as carefully as he could in