George Reed, who had stood like a man bewildered, looking first on one, then on the other of his dead little ones, answered that he had not. But the eldest child, Annie, spoke up, saying that there was a piece in her little work-box; Cathy had given it her last week when she was at home. It was produced--part of a small stick of fancy wax, green and gold. Duffham wrapped the pill-box up in the back of a letter that he took from his pocket, and sealed it with a seal that hung to his watch-chain. He put the parcel into the hand of George Reed. "Take care of it," he said. "This will be wanted." "There could not have been poison in them pills, sir," burst out Mrs. Reed, her distress increasing at the possibility that he might be right. "If there had been, they'd ha' poisoned me. One night I took three of 'em." Duffham did not answer. He was nodding his head in answer to his own thoughts. "And who ever heard of Abel Crew mixing up poison in his pills?" went on Mrs. Reed. "If you please, sir, I don't think he could do it." "Well, that part of it puzzles me--how he came to do it," acknowledged Duffham. "I like old Abel, and shall be sorry if it is proved that his pills have done the mischief." Mrs. Reed shook her head. She had more faith than that in Abel Crew. * * * * * Ever so many years before--for it was in the time of Sir Peter Chavasse--there appeared one day a wanderer at Church Dykely. It was hot weather, and he seemed to think nothing of camping out in the fields by night, under the summer stars. Who he was, or what he was, or why he had come, or why he stayed, nobody knew. He was evidently not a tramp, or a gipsy, or a travelling tinker--quite superior to it all; a slender, young, and silent man, with a pale and gentle face. At one corner of the common, spreading itself between the village and Chavasse Grange, there stood a covered wooden shed, formerly used to impound stray cattle, but left to itself since the square space for the new pound had been railed round. By-and-by it was found that the wanderer had taken to this shed to sleep in. Next, his name leaked out--"Abel Crew."