"I went back and reported what I had heard, and the very anxious wife suggested that I should snatch a hasty breakfast and then make inquiries at a farm a mile off, which was also their property. This I readily consented to do. I was extremely sorry for the poor woman, and though she did not make a confidant of me, I could see she was consumed with anxiety. "My errand was quite fruitless, nothing was known of the master, no one had seen him, and back I went to the mill house, feeling by this time that probably the wife had every cause for her anxiety. "I saw nothing of her when I entered. I looked into every room on the ground floor, and was just going to ring for a servant, when I fancied I heard a faint cry. "I went out into the hall and listened intently. The voice was calling from somewhere below the ground, and I thought at once of the huge cellars I had been shown, where once the good old ale had been brewed and stored. I ran to the door which led to the cellars; it was open, and then I clearly heard a woman's voice crying, 'Oh! bring a knife! bring a knife quickly!' "I darted back into the dining-room and caught up the first knife I could find, a ham carver, then hastened to the door and began descending the dark stairs. "The cellars were fairly well lighted by two grated windows, and a horrible sight met my eyes. There stood the wife, bending under the weight of her husband, who was suspended by a rope round his neck from the great beam overhead. One glance at the hideously distorted face, the glazed eyes protruding from their sockets, the gaping mouth and swollen tongue, told me the worst. "Hastily I severed the rope, and the wife and her dead husband sank to the ground together. "There was little to be done. We laid the corpse flat on the stone floor, and I persuaded her to leave it and come upstairs with me, and wait for the arrival of the doctor and police. This she consented to do. She was very quiet and composed, a curious apathy of indifference possessed her, and I would far rather have seen her in floods of natural tears. "By evening the house had fallen into a dead silence. The doctor had pronounced life to be extinct, and the corpse had been carried up to an unused bedroom immediately over the smoking-room. The police found that the mill owner had committed suicide by hanging. He had jumped off a stone slab, after having adjusted the rope to the beam and his own throat. With the exception of an old nurse who was devoted to her mistress, the servants all departed in a body, and the house was left brooding under a weight of intolerable depression.