"I assure you as to ghosts--I have no nerves!" said Janet with a
confident laugh, "and I don't think Rachel has either. We are more
frightened of rats. This farm-yard contains the biggest I've ever seen.
I dream of them at night."

"It's not exactly the ghost--" said the vicar, hesitating.

"But the story that produced the ghost? What--a murder?"

"Half a century ago," said the vicar reassuringly; "you won't mind that?"

"Not the least. A century ago would be romantic. If it was just the other
day, we should feel we ought to have got the farm cheaper. But half a
century doesn't matter. It's a mid-Victorian, just a plain, old-fashioned
murder. Who did it?"

The vicar opened his eyes a little. Miss Leighton was, he saw, a lady,
and perhaps clever. Her spectacles looked like it. No doubt she had been
at Oxford or Cambridge before going to Swanley? These educated women in
new professions were becoming a very pressing and common fact! As to the
murder, he explained that it had been just an ordinary poaching affair.
An old gamekeeper on the Shepherd estate had been attacked by a gang of
poachers in the winter of 1866. He had been shot in one of the woods, and
though mortally wounded had been able to drag himself to the outskirts of
the farm where his strength had failed him. He was found dead under the
cart-shed which backed on the stables, and the traces of blood on the
hill marked the stages of his struggle for life. Two men were suspected,
one of them a labourer on the Great End Farm; but there was no evidence.
The suspected labourer had gone to Canada the year after the murder, and