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glad to have this proved to you, would you not? If, on the other hand, there is a cause, it is a matter of some importance that it should be removed. What makes you think that someone is trying to kill you?’
    He looked up with an air of arrested attention.
    ‘Well, I thought they were.’
    Miss Silver coughed and said ‘They?’ on an enquiring note. She was knitting very fast in the continental fashion, her hands low in her lap, her eyes on her visitor.
    ‘Oh, well—that’s just a way of speaking. I haven’t an idea who it is.’
    ‘I think it would be better if you were to tell me what has happened. Something must have happened.’
    He nodded emphatically.
    ‘You’ve said it! The things happened—you can’t get away from that. Lumps of plaster aren’t just imagination, and no more is a lot of burnt ash where there used to be papers and a carpet.’
    Miss Silver said, ‘Dear me!’ And then, ‘Pray begin at the beginning and tell me all about these incidents.’
    He was sitting forward in his chair now, looking at her.
    ‘The bother is I don’t know where to begin.’
    Miss Silver coughed.
    ‘At the beginning, Major Pilgrim.’
    The eyes behind the glasses met hers in a worried look.
    ‘Well, as a matter of fact that’s just what beats me—I don’t know where it begins. You see, it’s not only me, it’s my father. I was out in the Middle East when my father died—I haven’t been home very long. And of course, as Fug says, there’s no evidence. But I ask you, why should a quiet beast that he’d ridden every day for the last ten years suddenly go mad and bolt with him? She’d never done such a thing in her life. When she came back all of a lather they went out to look for him, and found him with a broken neck. The old groom says she’d a thorn under the saddle—says somebody must have put it there. The trouble is it wasn’t the only one. She hadn’t thrown him, you see—they’d come down together, and the place was just a tangle of wild roses and brambles. But what William said, and what I say is, what would make her bolt? And we both got the same answer—only it isn’t evidence.’
    ‘What reason had anyone to wish your father dead?’
    ‘Ah—there you have me! There wasn’t any reason—not any reason .’
    The heavily accented word invited a question. Miss Silver obliged.
    ‘You speak as if there was something which was not a reason?’
    ‘Well, as a matter of fact that’s just about the size of it. Mind you, I don’t believe in that sort of thing myself, but if you were to ask William—that’s the groom I was talking about—or any of the other old people in the village, they’d say it was because he was going to sell the place.’
    ‘And there is a superstition about such a contingency?’
    The word appeared to puzzle him. He frowned, and then got there.
    ‘Oh, yes—I see what you mean. Well, as a matter of fact there is. The place has been in the family donkey’s years. I don’t set a lot of store by that sort of thing myself—a bit out of date, if you know what I mean. No good trying to live in the past and hang on to all the things your ancestors grabbed—is there? I mean, what’s the good? We haven’t any money, and if I fancied an heiress, she probably wouldn’t fancy me. So when my father wrote and said he was going to sell I told him that as far as I was concerned, he could get on with it—only as a matter of fact he never got the letter. But people in villages are very superstitious.’
    ‘What form does this superstition take, Major Pilgrim?’
    ‘Well, as a matter of fact it’s a rhyme. Some ass had it cut into the stone over the fireplace in the hall, so it’s always there—under everyone’s nose, so to speak.’
    Miss Silver coughed.
    ‘What does it say?’
    ‘It’s all rubbish of course—made up round our name and the name of the house. We’re Pilgrims, the house is Pilgrim’s Rest. And the rhyme says:
    “If Pilgrim fare upon the