The Vicar's Secret by Stanley J. Weyman — Read

The windows at the rear of Acton Chase, an old house in Worcestershire, look on a quaint bowling-green flanked by yew hedges, and backed by a stream of good size, on the farther side of which a sparsely timbered slope leads up to the home farm. It leads also to half a dozen smaller farms, which once formed the Chase. Zigzag up this slope runs a track -- probably it has so run for centuries, for at the foot of it is a ford -- which in spring is almost invisible, but in autumn is brown and rutty. The Chase has long been a Roman Catholic house, and up this track dead-and-gone squires, debarred from converse with their neighbours, have ridden a-hunting, mornings innumerable; so that to-day people sitting in the garden towards evening are apt to see them come trailing home, their horses jaded, and themselves calling for the black-jack.

Our story is not of these, but of two men who strolled down this path on an evening no farther back than last August. They seemed, outwardly at least, ill-matched. The one, a young fellow under thirty, fair-haired, pink-cheeked, prim-looking, was of middle size. He was dressed as a clergyman, but more neatly and trimly than the average country clergyman dresses. The other was one of the tallest and thinnest men ever seen outside a show -- a man whose very clothes, his worn jacket and shrunken knickerbockers, had the air of sharing his attenuation. He looked like a gamekeeper, and was, in fact, the squire's son-in-law, Jim Foley.