“Now, how in the world comes a Barbary pipe to travel so far over seas and herd in the end with common clays in a little Suffolk village?”

He heard behind him the grating of a chair violently pushed back.  The pipe seemingly made its appeal to Mr. Lance also.

“Has it been smoked?” he asked in a grave low voice.

“The inside of the bowl is stained,” said Mitchelbourne.

Mitchelbourne had been inclined to believe that he had seen last evening the extremity of fear expressed in a man’s face:  he had now to admit that he had been wrong.  Mr. Lance’s terror was a Circe to him and sunk him into something grotesque and inhuman; he ran once or twice in a little tripping, silly run backwards and forwards like an animal trapped and out of its wits; and his face had the look of a man suffering from a nausea; so that Mitchelbourne, seeing him, was ashamed and hurt for their common nature.

“I must go,” said Lance babbling his words.  “I cannot stay.  I must go.”

“To-night?” exclaimed Mitchelbourne.  “Six yards from the door you will be soaked!”

“Then there will be the fewer men abroad.  I cannot sleep here!  No, though it rained pistols and bullets I must go.”  He went into the passage, and calling his host secretly asked for his score.  Mitchelbourne made a further effort to detain him.

“Make an inquiry of the landlord first.  It may be a mere shadow that frightens you.”

“Not a word, not a question,” Lance implored.  The mere suggestion increased a panic which seemed incapable of increase.  “And for the shadow, why, that’s true.  The pipe’s the shadow, and the shadow frightens me.  A shadow!  Yes!  A shadow is a horrible, threatning thing!  Show me a shadow cast by nothing and I am with you.  But you might as easily hold that this Barbary pipe floated hither across the seas of its own will.  No!  ’Ware shadows, I say.”  And so he continued harping on the word, till the landlord fetched in the bill.

The landlord had his dissuasions too, but they availed not a jot more than Mr. Mitchelbourne’s.

“The road is as black as a pauper’s coffin,” said he, “and damnable with ruts.”

“So much the better,” said Lance.

“There is no house where you can sleep nearer than Glemham, and no man would sleep there could he kennel elsewhere.”

“So much the better,” said Lance.  “Besides, I am expected to-morrow evening at ‘The Porch’ and Glemham is on the way.”  He paid his bill, slipped over to the stables and lent a hand to the saddling of his horse.  Mitchelbourne, though for once in his life he regretted the precipitancy with which he welcomed strangers, was still sufficiently provoked to see the business to its end.  His imagination was seized by the thought of this fat and vulgar person fleeing in terror through English lanes from a Barbary Moor.  He had now a conjecture in his mind as to the nature of that greenish seed.  He accordingly rode out with Lance toward Glemham.