Mrs. Mullet, after glancing over each of her shoulders and dropping her voice to a furtive whisper, had once told me that Nicodemus Flitch’s strange brand of religion was still said to be practiced in the village, although nowadays strictly behind closed doors and drawn curtains.

“They dips their babies by the ’eels,” she said, wide-eyed. “Like Killies the ’Eel in the River Stynx, my friend Mrs. Waller says ’er Bert told ’er. Don’t you ’ave nothin’ to do with them ’Obblesr. They’ll ’ave your blood for sausages.”

I had grinned then and I smiled now as I recalled her words, but I shivered, too, as I thought of the Palings, and the shadows that swallowed its sunshine.

My last visit to the glade had been in spring when the clearing was carpeted with cowslips—“paigles,” Mrs. Mullet called them—and primroses.

Now the grove would be hidden by the tall elder bushes that grew along the river’s bank. It was too late in the season to see, and to inhale the delicious scent of, the elder flowers. Their white blossoms, like a horde of Japanese parasols, would have turned brown and vanished with the rains of June. Perhaps more cheerful was the thought that the purplish-black elderberries which took their place would soon be hanging in perfectly arranged clusters, like a picture gallery of dark bruises.

It was at the Palings, in the days of the early numbered Georges, that the river Efon had been diverted temporarily to form the ornamental lake and feed the fountains whose remnants dotted the lawns and terraces at Buckshaw. At the time of its construction, this marvel of subterranean hydraulic engineering had caused no end of hard feelings between my family and the local landowners, so that one of my ancestors, Lucius de Luce, had subsequently become known as “Leaking de Luce” to half the countryside.