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 be kept waiting?' or: 'I should like to know what your reverence is doing about that there dung?' or: 'I suppose you know that the cowman's girl may go off at any minute.' And then he'd take him down to the shrubbery and scold him. My heart bleeds for the poor old gentleman!"

"Mr. Jones"—Satan spoke demurely—"will have his reward in another life."

Laura was silent. She gazed at the Maulgrave Folly with what she could feel to be a pensive expression. But her mind was a blank.

"A delicate point, you say? Perhaps it is bad taste on my part to jest about it."

A midge settled on Laura's wrist. She smacked at it.

"Dead!" said Satan.

The word dropped into her mind like a pebble thrown into a pond. She had heard it so often, and now she heard it once more. The same waves of thought circled outwards, waves of startled thought spreading out on all sides, locking the shadows of familiar things, blurring the steadfast pictures of trees and clouds, circling outward one after the other, each wave more listless, more imperceptible than the last, until the pool was still again.