"Miss Farnish! Eh, dear--such a turn as it's given me!--Miss Farnish! There's Mr. Grice--there in his parlour--sittin' i' his chair, Miss Farnish, an' wi' his bottle o' sperrits i' front o' him, and all--such an end, to be sure!--and dead--aye, and must ha' died last night, for he's as cowd as ice. An' will you come back wi' me, Miss Farnish?--I'm fair feared to go in agen by misen!" Jeckie turned and looked down at the woman--a little wizened creature--with an incredulous stare. "What do you say?" she demanded sharply. "Grice? Dead?" "Dead as a door-nail, Miss Farnish, as sure as I'm here--and sittin' i' t'easy chair at his table----" Jeckie looked round at the offending shop-boy; even then she considered her own affairs first. "You get another pail o' water, and swill them flags again this minute!" she commanded. "And mind you do it right, or else----" She broke off at that, and without another word to the agitated woman who was staring at her with affrighted eyes, marched straight across the street, through George Grice's yard and in at the side-door of the house. She knew her way about that house as well as its late master, and she turned at once into the parlour in which she had never set foot since that morning, years before, on which she had gone there to beg Grice's help. She saw at one glance that Grice himself was now beyond all human help, and for a moment she stood and looked at his dead face with keen, critical eyes. Death, instead of smoothing the lines of his naturally sly and crafty countenance, had deepened them; it was not a pleasant sight that Jeckie looked at. And the woman, who had crept in after her, spoke in a half-frightened whisper. "Lord save us!--he don't mak' a beautiful corpse, trew-ly, does he, Miss Farnish?" she said. "He looks that hard and graspin', same as he did when a poor body wanted summat and----" "He must have had a stroke and died in it," remarked Jeckie, in matter-of-fact tones. "And I should say, as he died all alone, 'at there'll have to be an inquest, so don't you touch aught 'at there is on that table. You go round and tell the policeman to come here at once for he'll have to let the coroner know. Don't say aught to anybody else till he's been, and I'll go and send one of my lads for Mr. Albert." The woman hurried away, and Jeckie, waiting there with the dead man until the policeman arrived, hated him worse than ever. For she had never seen the shutters go up in his lifetime--he had held out to the end, and cheated her of her cherished revenge. Yet never mind--the Grice business was over; that she knew very well; henceforth she was a monopolist. And when the policeman had come and had taken charge of matters, she went across to her stables, where her van-man was just putting a horse into a light cart. "Here!" she said, "you're going up to t'top o' t'village, Watkinson. Drive on, as soon as you've delivered those parcels, to Mr. Albert Grice's--tell him his father's dead."