Eternity Ring by Patricia Wentworth Page B

she was, but she stopped herself and said she must get on with her work.”
    Miss Silver set down her teacup and remarked,
    “So much goes on in a village, does it not? Really quite a little world. Most interesting. So Miss Stokes delivers the eggs and butter. Do you deal with her, Mrs. Abbott?”
    Monica said, “Sometimes—when our hens don’t lay. Mrs. Stokes is cleverer with hers than I am. But we make our own butter. Cicely makes it. She’s very proud of her butter.”
    “Most delicious,” said Miss Silver. “Country butter is always such a treat. Do your neighbours also deal with the Stokeses?”
    Mrs. Bowse broke into a hearty laugh.
    “Mark Harlow does, and so does Grant Hathaway. Silly, isn’t it, a farmer having to buy butter? I told him everyone was laughing over it, and he only laughed too and said, ‘Wait till my nursery grows up, then you’ll all find out what can be done in the milk and cream and butter line!’ Well, of course that’s all very well for a joke, and I’m sure I wish him every success, and so will every other woman in the place. That’s what I meant about the handsome young men. You don’t imagine Mary Stokes goes delivering down the village street? That would be rather too much like work, and not at all in her line. Oh, no, she just comes down the Lane and does Deepside, and the Grange, and Abbottsleigh, and if she doesn’t get a chance of making eyes at Grant or Mark, there’s always Albert Caddie.” She laughed in what Miss Silver considered a distressingly loud manner.
    Miss Alvina sighed and said,
    “I am afraid she must be very dull here—and after all it is natural for a girl to like young men.” She twittered a little as she continued. “I really don’t think it is very kind of you to talk about her like that, Mabel—and when she has had such a shock.” She turned back to Miss Silver. “Mrs. Abbott will have told you about the dreadful fright poor Mary had. She and Mr. Frank Abbott were having tea with me—so very pleasant. And then such a shock, poor Mary running in like that and saying she’d seen someone murdered.”
    “Very startling indeed.”
    Mrs. Bowse said, “Rubbish! Oh, not present company, you know. But this girl’s ridiculous story—pure exhibitionism the whole thing! I said so to my brother. ‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘Mary Stokes has no more seen a murdered corpse than I have. She’s bored to death at the farm, and she’s thought up a way of making everybody talk about her. You mark my words,’ I said, ‘it’s nothing but showing off.’ ”
    Miss Alvina persevered in a small determined voice.
    “Of course Dead Man’s Copse hasn’t at all a good name. I don’t know if you have heard the story.”
    “I should like to hear it very much,” said Miss Silver.
    Both ladies drew their chairs a little closer and the narration proceeded. If Frank Abbott had been there he would have been interested to notice that it varied by scarcely a word from the tale as she had told it to him.
    Miss Silver listened with deep attention. When the story was done she commented on the harmful nature of a belief in witchcraft.
    “It led, I fear, to many superstitions and cruelties.”
    Miss Alvina agreed.
    “Yes, indeed! My dear father was very much interested in the subject. He collected quite a number of stories of the kind and wrote them down. There were a few copies privately printed. I have a copy if you would care to see it. Old Mr. Hathaway had one too. He was a good deal interested in the subject himself— not Grant, you know, but the cousin from whom he inherited, old Mr. Alvin Hathaway. He and my father were very much of an age—he was ninety-five when he died—and they were very great friends. He was in fact my godfather, and I am called after him—Alvina.”
    “A pretty and unusual name,” pronounced Miss Silver.
    Mrs. Bowse had been supplying Monica Abbott with a number of horrid and undesired details about the decease of the village