Deep Moat Grange

"That's the Geneva pattern," she said calmly. "It's plaster from my 'First Aid to the Wounded' case. I always carry it – so convenient. Now let us go back and tell Mr. Yarrow!"

"Before we start," I said, "I think you had better give me that pistol, and after this you stick to your First Aids!"

"If I had stuck to my First Aids," she retorted, "you wouldn't have needed any aids – first, second, or third!"

However, she handed over the revolver, "not (as she said) because she was afraid of it, but because it weighed down her pocket so much it was making her walk lopsided!"

*****

There is ever so much to tell – about how Elsie and I quarrelled and made up – that of course. How Mr. Yarrow, senior, would and Mrs. Yarrow wouldn't. How my mother pestered me about Harriet Caw, and Mr. Mustard pestered Elsie on his own account. Then, there is all about how we were at last rid of the Caw girls, Harriet and Constantia both, and who rid us of them. That is a ripping part. There isn't so much battle, murder, and sudden death in all this, but it's even more interesting, especially the part where Elsie and I decided to take our fate into our own hands. It all came right enough in the end, of course, or I shouldn't be writing like this, looking out on the sheep pasturing on the Cheviot slopes, and listening to the whaups crying.

But for certain private reasons Elsie and I want a little more money this year. She is sewing away like a house on fire, with her feet on the fender by the hearth. So if you want to know about it, just pester some editor man to get us to write it all out for him. And we will do it gladly.

As for me, I am working up quite a good business connection on this side of the border for my father. You see, Elsie couldn't stand the neighbourhood of Breckonside and Deep Moat Grange after what had happened. And, indeed, I don't blame her. Her opinion on mice, black beetles, and the two Caw girls, particularly Harriet, is still unchanged – even though Harriet – but there, I really can't go on with the story without another penny in the slot.

It is quite enough to say that Aphra Orrin got imprisonment for life in an asylum for criminal lunatics, that I got Elsie, and that Elsie seems in a fair way to get what will take her thoughts, once and for all, off the gloomy woods and terrible waters which surround the house of Deep Moat Grange.

THE END