There May Be Danger Read Online Free PDF

of gossip to pass on about Mr. Atkin’s domestic life. “I wonder as that young lady likes to stay on there. No company, either. Gideon Atkins does not like visitors. There iss only the summer visitors from Llanfyn that comes to see the old Abbey ruins, and there iss not so many of them as there used to be, now that Gideon Atkins makes them pay sixpence each! Sixpence each they hass to pay, to go and look inside his farmyard at a lot of old stones!”
    â€˜Ah, Gideon Atkins would ask sixpence admission to his own funeral,” remarked Mr. Davis, clucking to his horse as if to share the joke with it. “And there’s plenty would pay it, whatever!”
    â€œAnd he’ll have ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ written on his tomb-stone, too!” added Mrs. Davis with bright enjoyment.
    Kate was certainly a little surprised that Aminta had made no comments on this individual. All Aminta had said about her employer was that he was a transplanted Yorkshire man. Yet Mr. Gideon Atkins was evidently a character of the countryside, and, to judge by this harping on his future obsequies, not a popular one.
    They had descended the hill now, and were clopping quickly along a little road that led through the valley. Kate, who was tired, stiff, cold, hungry and getting wetter every minute around the wrists and ankles, longed for a lamp and a fire.
    â€œIt’ll be black-out time soon now, I expect,” said Mrs. Davis. “Reckon them’ll be very strict with the black-out in London, Missie?”
    â€œYes, very strict.”
    â€œThem’s pretty strict here. Oh, ah. Pretty strict them is.”
    â€œAnd so they ought to be!” said his wife vigorously. “We have aeroplanes flying over here often at night. The Berminster water works is quite close the other side of Rhosbach, which is this hill ahead of you, Miss. Well, here is Hastry. And that is Howells the post, up the bank beyond the school.”
    They were plodding uphill again, and had entered a pleasant little village that seemed to cling to the side of the great rain-hidden hill. The houses lay mostly to one side of the hillside road and looked across the little valley. Here and there along the street a lit window looked a welcome. One or two little slate-roofed cottages lay higher up the slope, like look-outs keeping a watch upon the valley for the whole village. They passed the humped church behind its great yew-trees, and the neat, but regrettably red-brick, elementary school; and a little farther up Mr. Davis drew rein before a row of cottages, the character of whose walls was hidden under many coats of whitewash, but whose pleasant wide-angled gables and stone roofs vouched for their antiquity. They lay above the road, with steep little front gardens still cheerful with set and drooping asters, marigolds and dahlias, and one of them, the end one, had a Post Office sign, and a little window filled with jars of sweets and faded cardboard packets of groceries.
    â€œHere you be!” said Mr. Davis. “Us’ll wait and see you in.”
    â€œMrs. Howells will give you a room, I am sure,” said Mrs. Davis, handing Kate’s knapsack down to her. “But if Mrs. Howells cannot take you, you are welcome to Pentrewer for the night.”
    â€œOh, how kind of you!” said Kate gratefully, hoping all the same that she was not doomed to a further journey in the trap in the rain, which was now setting in with a bleak determination to soak everything thoroughly before the morning. “Thank you a thousand times for giving me a lift! I should have got wet if I’d walked!”
    She would not really have got much wetter, and she would certainly not have got so cold, reflected Kate, as she hurried quickly up the steps of the steep little garden so as not to keep her kind friends sitting in the rain: but she would have missed quite a lot of interesting and possibly fruitful information. The first thing