'Let me see, where was I? Oh, I know, aunt saw the boy grinning in the
hedge. Yes, well, she was dreadfully frightened for a minute or two;
there was something so queer about the face, but then she plucked up a
spirit and said to herself, "After all, better a boy with red hair than
a big man with a gun," and she made up her mind to watch Uncle Robert
closely, as she could see by his look he knew all about it; he seemed as
if he were thinking hard and puzzling over something, as if he didn't
know what to do next, and his mouth kept opening and shutting, like a
fish's. So she kept her face straight, and didn't say a word, and when
he said something to her about the fine sunset, she took no notice.
"Don't you hear what I say, Marian?" he said, speaking quite crossly,
and bellowing as if it were to somebody in the next field. So aunt said
she was very sorry, but her cold made her so deaf, she couldn't hear
much. She noticed uncle looked quite pleased, and relieved too, and she
knew he thought she hadn't heard the whistling. Suddenly uncle pretended
to see a beautiful spray of honeysuckle high up in the hedge, and he
said he must get it for aunt, only she must go on ahead, as it made him
nervous to be watched. She said she would, but she just stepped aside
behind a bush where there was a sort of cover in the hedge, and found
she could see him quite well, though she scratched her face terribly
with poking it into a rose bush. And in a minute or two out came the boy
from behind the hedge, and she saw uncle and him talking, and she knew
it was the same boy, as it wasn't dark enough to hide his flaming red
head. And uncle put out his hand as if to catch him, but he just darted
into the bushes and vanished. Aunt never said a word at the time, but
that night when they got home she charged uncle with what she'd seen and
asked him what it all meant. He was quite taken aback at first, and
stammered and stuttered and said a spy wasn't his notion of a good wife,
but at last he made her swear secrecy, and told her that he was a very
high Freemason, and that the boy was an emissary of the order who
brought him messages of the greatest importance. But aunt didn't believe
a word of it, as an uncle of hers was a mason, and he never behaved like
that. It was then she began to be afraid that it was really Anarchists,
or something of the kind, and every time the bell rang she thought that
uncle had been found out, and the police had come for him.'
'What nonsense! As if a man with house property would be an Anarchist.'
'Well, she could see there must be some horrible secret, and she didn't
know what else to think. And then she began to have the things through
the post.'
'Things through the post! What do you mean by that?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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