"Why did you cry out murder, Giles?" he asked the rough-looking man who held me. "There isn't a wound on her body. It's a fit, I believe." The man Giles loosened me. "If I've been mistaken," he began, when a cry from a little woman cut his speech short. "Her eye's out; her eye's out--the left one. Look! look!" and she seized a bystander's arm in terror. Sure enough the left eye was missing, and I wondered why I had not noticed that such was the case when I examined the body by the light of the lucifer-match. I remembered distinctly the glassy, expressionless eyes, and yet, now there was only one, as I now saw plainly enough. Doubtless in the flickering light of the match and in my agitation, I had omitted to see that there was but one eye. Even at so critical a moment I began to wonder how I could have overlooked so obvious a fact, and then recalled the story a friend had told me of a man he had met with in the States, and to whom he spoke for five minutes, thinking there was something odd about his appearance, before he saw that both ears were missing. So easily, as I considered, even when placid can we fail to notice what is plainly apparent, much less when unnerved as I was when examining that dead face in the match-light. It was an odd thought at the time, considering that I stood in such peril. Had this cottage been in America I daresay I should have been lynched by the rough crowd of villagers around me. "It's not murder maybe," growled Giles, seizing me again. "But this devil has torn her eye out, so----" "There's no blood," said another man wisely. "If the eye had been torn out----" "It was a glass eye," breathed a stout, dark woman with a heavy face. "Anne told me as much when we had tea together. She didn't like it to be known, poor soul, being proud like, and took great pains to get the best eye she could. But it's gone, sure enough." She peered into the dead face and then at me. "Perhaps this gentleman will tell us why he took it." By this time, since apparently Anne Caldershaw had not been murdered and the eye was merely glass, the current of popular feeling was running more in my favour. I might be a thief, with the eye in my pocket, but I was not a murderer, so the villagers gave me time for explanation. "I quite understand that things look black against me," I said hastily, "but I know nothing about the matter. I arrived in front of this shop in my motor car and stopped to get petrol. After I filled up and left the money--you will find it on the counter, if you look--I heard a moan and stepped into this room to see what was wrong. While looking at the body, after lighting a match, someone locked me in and ran off with my motor car." The villagers looked at one another, and apparently thought that my explanation was a lame one. But Giles, who had treated me so roughly, grudgingly admitted that he had seen the motor car.