Ah! There it was! “Torp, Stonecutter.” He gazed with interest at the various monuments for the dead, which lay about on the ground or stood erect and challenging against the wall. It produced a queer impression, this crowd of anonymous tombstones, the owners and possessors whereof even now cheerfully walking about the earth.

“I must get this Torp to show me what he’s done for poor Redfern,” he thought, as he passed on to the door of the house.

He knocked at the door and was so instantaneously admitted that it was with a certain degree of confusion that he found himself in the very heart of the stonecutter’s household.

They had evidently just finished their midday meal. Mrs. Torp, a lean, cadaverous woman, was clearing the table. The stonecutter himself, a plump, lethargic man, with a whimsical eye, was smoking his pipe by the fire. A handsome boy of about eleven, who had evidently just opened the door to let himself out, fell back now and stared at the stranger with a bold impertinence.