2: The Lethal Ray
AS COLONEL SANDERSTEAD passed the trim Vicarage on the following morning, the door opened and he paused for a moment to let the Vicar join him. The Reverend Peter Flitterwick was a shade older than the Colonel— a thin, clean-shaven man with a slight stoop, and spectacles which lent him an air of peering benevolence.
“Good morning, Flitterwick. Pleasant day.”
“Good morning, Colonel. Indeed a most pleasant day and a pleasant place also. Angulus ridet, as Horace has it; this little corner of the world smiles to me each time I cross my door.”
“Oh, yes, quite so.”
The Colonel, somehow, never cared to hear Flitterwick’s praises of his beloved village; for some obscure reason, he felt a suspicion that they arose more from toadyism than from any real appreciation of Fernhurs
