Eternity Ring Read Online Free PDF Page A

used to call the “Huguenot.” “Bubbles” still watched the flight of perishable joy. Cosy, very cosy, was Miss Silver’s invariable conclusion. And so providentially preserved.
    She said, “Pray continue, my dear Frank,” and was all attention.
    “Well, as I said, it’s right up your street. There was this girl battering on the door and crying murder, and falling down in a dead faint as soon as she got inside. Rather a pretty girl—on the up-and-coming side, I should think, when not on the edge of being frightened to death.”
    “Was she known to your aunt and Miss Grey?”
    “Oh, yes. Name of Mary Stokes. Demobilized from the A.T.S. and helping on an uncle’s farm on the other side of the Common. Rather pretty, as I said. Rather silly and—I’m not so sure about this, but I got a sort of idea that underneath all the screaming and fainting there was something—well, tough.”
    “What made you think so?”
    “I don’t know. She came round pretty quick—I thought there were indications that the brain was ticking over. I may have got it all wrong—girls are so odd. Of course you read them like a book. I wish you had been there. Anyhow Monica and Miss Grey got her round, and after some preliminary gasping this is what she said. Her uncle has a farm on the other side of the Common—Tomlin’s Farm it’s called. All the land over there and down as far as Deeping used to belong to a family called Tomalyn. They’ve died out years ago, but the farm keeps the name. The farmer is Stokes, same like the niece. Well, she was coming in to Deeping by the path I told you about, the one running through Dead Man’s Copse.”
    Miss Silver coughed.
    “Would it be the way she would naturally come?”
    His left eyebrow rose a trifle.
    “It’s the nearest way.”
    “There is another?”
    “Yes, there is. It’s a little longer and comes into the village farther on—in fact very nearly at the other end. It’s the driving-road. No one in their senses would take a car over the other, though I daresay it’s been done—there are a lot of lunatics on the road. Anyhow that’s one of the things that made me feel Miss Mary Strokes might be tough. I gather that the local inhabitants don’t queue up to go through Dead Man’s Copse in the dark.”
    Miss Silver’s needles clicked.
    “It was dark?”
    He shrugged slightly.
    “As pitch. After six of a black January evening.”
    She said, “Go on, Frank.”
    “Well, this is her story. The path dips to the Copse, which is quite a dense little wood. She says she heard something and went off the path into the bushes. When she was asked why, she said because she was frightened, and when she was asked what frightened her she said she didn’t know, she just thought she heard something. You can go round and round like that for quite a time without getting any forarder. When she had led the local constable round and round the mulberry bush for as long as my patience would last I suggested that we should get on with what happened.”
    Miss Silver’s small, shrewd eyes were on his face.
    “Did she appear to you to be trying to gain time—to collect herself, or perhaps to think out what she was going to say?”
    A faint smile just touched his lips.
    “It did occur to me—especially when she had another prolonged sobbing fit. When we got her going she said she heard the noise again, and this time it was footsteps and something being dragged. They passed close beside her and on to the path, and then there was the beam of a torch and she saw a man’s hand and arm and—what he had been dragging. She said it was the body of a murdered girl and that is what she has stuck to up hill and down dale.”
    Miss Silver was knitting rapidly. She held her needles low, in the continental fashion, and hardly ever glanced at them. She looked across them now and said,
    “Dear me!”
    “Dear me it is—and with knobs on.”
    “My dear Frank—what an expression!”
    “Consider it retracted.