BOB LEWTHWAITE, the child who had watched Sir Anthony Gyde entering and leaving Skirle Cottage, was of a venturesome disposition. He feared few things except “boggles.” He feared Klein a bit, but not nearly so much as the other children of the village. The fact of Sir Anthony’s visit to the cottage stirred his rustic imagination, and a great inspiration came to him to do as young Britten had done, peep through the window.

He came down the fell side towards the cottage, half undecided in his mind; at the fell foot he was half inclined to give up the business, then, suddenly, he cast fear away, and crawling along by the cottage wall reached the window, raised himself on tip-toe, and peeped.

What he saw he did not quite understand at first. Then it became horribly clearer.

There was a great grey bundle on the white cottage-floor; then the thing, on closer inspection, became a human body. But there was no head. There was a pool of something dark near where the head ought to have been.

It was Klein’s body; he recognized it, because of the clothes, a grey homespun suit, that all the neighbourhood knew. It was Klein, but he had no head.

Murder never occurred to the child; he only recognized the fact that the man he had seen walking about the day before had suddenly lost his head, and the horror of this fact, suddenly borne in on him, was greater than he could well bear.

He ran he knew not whither, but presently he found himself sitting under a wall shivering and shaking and very sick.

Then he went home, but he did not tell what he had seen.

He sat in a corner of his father’s cottage looking “waugh.” He would take no tea, and he went to bed mum. But no sooner was he undressed and between the sheets than suddenly, as if touched off, he began to bellow.

Then it all came out helter............