One day the village was stirred to unusual excitement.  Two items of local news, following quickly one upon the other, gave the folk so much matter for gossip that the amount of work they did was reduced fifty per cent.  The first was that Nahum Noakes’s final appeal had failed; the second, that young Wilfred Banks, the son of Squire Banks, one of the local magnates, had been seriously injured by the fall of an aeroplane.