’Each member shall, on the death of another member, pay 1s. for
    benefit of widow or nominee of deceased, same to be paid within
    one month after notice given.’

‘Or nominee—­nominee,’ he murmured reflectively, staring at the card.  He mechanically noticed, what he had noticed often before with disdain, that the chairman had signed the rules without the use of capitals.

    He went back to the dusk of the coach-house to finish his letter,
    still murmuring the word ‘nominee,’ of whose meaning he was not
    quite sure: 

    ’I request that the money due to me from the Slate Club on my death
    shall be paid to my nominee, Miss Susan Trimmer, now staying with
    her aunt, Mrs. Penrose, at Bursley.

    ’Yours respectfully,

    ‘WILLIAM FROYLE.’

After further consideration he added: 

’P.S.—­My annual salary of sixpence per member would be due at the end of December.  If so be the members would pay that, or part of it, should they consider the same due, to Susan Trimmer as well, I should be thankful.—­Yours resp, W.F.’

He put the letter in an envelope, and, taking it to the large room, laid it carefully at the end of the table opposite the chairman’s seat.  Once more he returned to the coach-house.  From the hanging cupboard he now produced a piece of rope.  Standing on the table he could just reach, by leaning forward, a hook in the ceiling, that was sometimes used for the slinging of bicycles.  With difficulty he made the rope fast to the hook.  Putting a noose on the other end, he tightened it round his neck.  He looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor in order to judge whether the rope was short enough.

‘Good-bye, Susan, and everyone,’ he whispered, and then stepped off the table.

The tense rope swung him by his neck halfway across the coach-house.  He swung twice to and fro, but as he passed under the hook for the fifth time his toes touched the floor.  The rope had stretched.  In another second he was standing firm on the floor, purple and panting, but ignominiously alive.

‘Good-even to you, Mr. Froyle.  Be you committing suicide?’ The tones were drawling, uncertain, mildly astonished.

He turned round hastily, his hands busy with the rope, and saw in the doorway the figure of Daft Jimmy, the Moorthorne idiot.

He hesitated before speaking, but he was not confused.  No one could have been confused before Daft Jimmy.  Neither man nor woman in the village considered his presence more than that of a cat.

‘Yes, I am,’ he said.

The middle-aged idiot regarded him with a vague, interested smile, and came into the coach-house.

‘You’n gotten the rope too long, Mr. Froyle.  Let me help you.’

Froyle calmly assented.  He stood on the table, and the two rearranged the noose and made it secure.  As they did so the idiot gossiped: