envelope, and, taking it to the large room, laid
it carefully at the end of the table opposite the chairman's seat. Once
more he returned to the coach-house. From the hanging cupboard he now
produced a piece of rope. Standing on the table he could just reach, by
leaning forward, a hook in the ceiling, that was sometimes used for the
slinging of bicycles. With difficulty he made the rope fast to the hook.
Putting a noose on the other end, he tightened it round his neck. He
looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor in order to judge whether
the rope was short enough.

'Good-bye, Susan, and everyone,' he whispered, and then stepped off the
table.

The tense rope swung him by his neck halfway across the coach-house. He
swung twice to and fro, but as he passed under the hook for the fifth
time his toes touched the floor. The rope had stretched. In another
second he was standing firm on the floor, purple and panting, but
ignominiously alive.

'Good-even to you, Mr. Froyle. Be you committing suicide?' The tones
were drawling, uncertain, mildly astonished.

He turned round hastily, his hands busy with the rope, and saw in the
doorway the figure of Daft Jimmy, the Moorthorne idiot.

He hesitated before speaking, but he was not confused. No one could have
been confused before Daft Jimmy. Neither man nor woman in the village
considered his presence more than that of a cat.

'Yes, I am,' he said.

The middle-aged idiot regarded him with a vague, interested smile, and
came into the coach-house.

'You'n gotten the rope too long, Mr. Froyle. Let me help you.'

Froyle calmly assented. He stood on the table, and the two rearranged
the noose and made it secure. As they did so the idiot gossiped:

'I was going to Bursley to-night to buy me a pair o' boots, and when I
was at top o' th' hill I remembered as I'd forgotten the measure o' my
feet. So I ran back again for it. Then I saw the light in here, and I
stepped up to bid ye good-evening.'

Someone had told him the ancient story of the fool and his boots, and,
with the pride of an idiot in his idiocy, he had determined that it
should be related of himself.

Froyle was silent.

The idiot laughed with a dry cackle.

'Now you go,' said Froyle, when the rope was fixed.

'Let me see ye do it,' the idiot pleaded with pathetic eyes.

'No; out you get!'

Protesting, the idiot went forth, and his irregular clumsy footsteps
sounded on the pebble-paved yard. When the nois