They thought they could do what they liked with
impunity when they saw I was a clergyman. You don't know how common
that kind of anti-clerical spirit is. Simpkins is evidently swelled
out with it. It's going now, like an epidemic. Look at France and
Italy. The one chance we have of keeping Ireland free from it is to
isolate each case the moment it appears. By far the wisest thing we
can do is to have Simpkins killed at once."
"I don't quite see how you are going to manage it, J. J., without being
hanged yourself."
"Is he a married man?"
"No, he isn't."
"Then the matter's perfectly simple. I don't think I mentioned to you,
Major, that I travelled down in the train to-day with a professional
murderess."
"Do try to talk sense, J. J."
"Her speciality is husbands," said Meldon. "I don't know exactly how
many she has done for in her time, but there must be several. She said
their ghosts haunted her at night, and that sometimes she couldn't
sleep on account of them."
"I suppose," said Major Kent, "that it amuses you to babble like an
idiot in an asylum."
"It doesn't amuse me in the least. I feel desperately depressed when I
think of those poor fellows lying in their graves with ounces and
ounces of strychnine in their stomachs.
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