Carrados picked up the tube again. A couple of sentences passed and
the car stopped by the roadside, a score of paces past the limit of
the garden. Mr. Carlyle took out his notebook and wrote down the
address of a firm of house agents.

"You might raise the bonnet and have a look at the engines, Harris,"
said Carrados. "We want to be occupied here for a few minutes."

"This is sudden; Hollyer knew nothing of their leaving," remarked Mr.
Carlyle.

"Probably not for three months yet. All the same, Louis, we will go on
to the agents and get a card to view whether we use it to-day or not."

A thick hedge, in its summer dress effectively screening the house
beyond from public view, lay between the garden and the road. Above
the hedge showed an occasional shrub; at the corner nearest to the car
a chestnut flourished. The wooden gate, once white, which they had
passed, was grimed and rickety. The road itself was still the
unpretentious country lane that the advent of the electric car had
found it. When Carrados had taken in these details there seemed little
else to notice. He was on the point of giving Harris the order to go
on when his ear caught a trivial sound.

"Someone is coming out of the house, Louis," he warned his friend. "It
may be Hollyer, but he ought to have gone by this time."

"I don't hear anyone," replied the other, but as he spoke a door
banged noisily and Mr. Carlyle slipped into another seat and ensconced
himself behind a copy of _The Globe_.