The fleeting light soon expired, and twilight was succeeded by the
early night.
The inn yard gradually became quiet; and the dead sexton lay alone, in
the dark, on his back, locked up in the old coach-house, the key of
which was safe in the pocket of Tom Scales, the trusty old hostler of
the George.
It was about eight o'clock, and the hostler, standing alone on the
road in the front of the open door of the George and Dragon, had just
smoked his pipe out. A bright moon hung in the frosty sky. The fells
rose from the opposite edge of the lake like phantom mountains. The
air was stirless. Through the boughs and sprays of the leafless elms
no sigh or motion, however hushed, was audible. Not a ripple glimmered
on the lake, which at one point only reflected the brilliant moon from
its dark blue expanse like burnished steel. The road that runs by the
inn door, along the margin of the lake, shone dazzlingly white.
White as ghosts, among the dark holly and juniper, stood the tall
piers of the Vicar's gate, and their great stone balls, like heads,
overlooking the same road, a few hundred yards up the lake, to the
left. The early little town of Golden Friars was quiet by this time.
Except for the townsfolk who were now collected in the kitchen of the
inn itself, no inhabitant was now outside his own threshold.
Tom Scales was thinking of turning in. He was beginning to fell a
little queer. He was thinking of the sexton, and could not get the
fixed features of the dead man out of his head, when he heard the
sharp though distant ring of a horse's hoof upon the frozen road.
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