Once upon a time there lived a poor widow woman in Coombe,
with two sons, aged fourteen and sixteen, who worked at a farm
in the village. She had a lover, a middle-aged man, living at
Woodhay, a carrier who used to go on two or three days each
week with his cart to deliver parcels at Coombe. But he was a
married man, and as he could not marry the widow while his
wife remained alive, it came into his dull Berkshire brain
that the only way out of the difficulty was to murder her, and
to this course the widow probably consented. Accordingly, one
day, he invited or persuaded her to accompany him on his
journey to the remote village, and on the way he got her out
of the cart and led her into a close thicket to show her
something he had discovered there. What he wished to show her
(according to one version of the story) was a populous
hornets' nest, and having got her there he suddenly flung her
against it and made off, leaving the cloud of infuriated
hornets to sting her to death. That night he slept at Coombe,
or stayed till a very late hour at the widow's cottage and
told her what he had done. In telling her he had spoken in
his ordinary voice, but by and by it occurred to him that the
two boys, who were sleeping close by in the living-room, might
have been awake and listening. She assured him that they were
both fast asleep, but he was not satisfied, and said that if
they had heard him he would kill them both, as he had no wish
to swing, and he could not trust them to hold their tongues.
Thereupon they got up and examined the faces of the two boys,
holding a candle over them, and saw that they were in a deep
sleep, as was natural after their long day's hard work on the
farm, and the murderer's fears were set at rest. Yet one of