lived in a house so picturesque that merely to see it made you long
either to poison or to marry Mr. Dawson--preferably, I think, to
poison him.

These facts, stripped of the redundances with which I have
garnished them, were told Fritzing on the day after his arrival
at Baker's Farm by Mrs. Pearce the younger, old Mr. Pearce's
daughter-in-law, a dreary woman with a rent in her apron, who
brought in the bacon for Fritzing's solitary breakfast and the chop
for his solitary luncheon. She also brought in a junket so liquid
that the innocent Fritzing told her politely that he always drank
his milk out of a glass when he did drink milk, but that, as he
never did drink milk, she need not trouble to bring him any.

"Sir," said Mrs. Pearce in her slow sad voice, after a glance at his
face in search of sarcasm, "'tisn't milk. 'Tis a junket that hasn't
junked."

"Indeed?" said Fritzing, bland because ignorant.

Mrs. Pearce fidgeted a little, wrestling perhaps with her conscience,
before she added defiantly, "It wouldn't."

"Indeed?" said Fritzing once more; and he looked at the junket through
his spectacles with that air of extreme and intelligent interest with
which persons who wish to please look at other people's babies.

He was desirous of being on good terms with Symford, and had been very
pleasant all the morning to Mrs. Pearce. That mood in which, shaken
himself to his foundations by anxiety, he had shaken his fist to