been blazing like a bonfire! Well, there, you
do 'ear of such things, and now we know 'ow they 'appen."

To this extraordinary tune, with many such variations, I was meanwhile
making up my mind. The first necessity was to place the intrepid old
fool really out of harm's way, and the next was to save, the house if
possible, but also and at all costs the good name of the Witching Hill
Estate. We had had one suicide, and it had not been hushed up quite as
successfully as some of us flattered ourselves at the time; one case of
gross intemperance, most scandalous while it lasted, and one gang of
burglars actually established on the Estate. People were beginning to
talk about us as it was; a case of attempted arson, even if the
incendiary were proved a criminal lunatic, might be the end of us as a
flourishing concern. It is true that I had no stake in the Company whose
servant I was; but one does not follow the dullest avocation for three
years without taking a certain interest of another kind. At any rate I
intended the secret of this locked room to remain as much a secret as I
could keep it, and this gave me an immediate leverage over Sarah. Unless
she took herself off before her master returned, I assured her I would
have him sent, not to an asylum, but to the felon's cell which I
described as the proper place for him. I was not so sure in my own mind
that I meant him to go to one or the other. But this was the bargain
that I proposed to Sarah.

It came out that she had friends, in the shape of a labouring brother
and his wife and family, whom I strongly suspected of having migrated on
purpose to keep in touch with Sarah's kitchen, no further away than the
Village. I succeeded in packing the old thing off in that direction,
after making her lock her door at the top of the house. Previously I had
removed the marks of my boot from the extinguished candles, and had left
the locked room locked once more and in total darkness. Sarah and I
quitted the house together before ten o'clock.

"I'll see that your master doesn't do himself any damage to-night,"
were my last words to her. "He'll think the candles have been blown out
by a draught under the door--which really wouldn't catch them till they
burnt quite low--and that you are asleep in your bed at the top of the
house. You've left everything as though you were; and that alone, as you
yourself have pointed out, is enough to guarantee his not trying it on
again to-night. You s