though he lay quiet enough, with not one grain of expression in
his cold black eyes.

The 11:39 pulled up at Countisford station, and Lawrence Hyde got
out of a first class smoking carriage and stood at ease, waiting
for his servant to come and look after him. "There'll be a car
waiting from Wanhope, Gaston--"

"Zere no car 'ere, M'sieu--ze man say."

"What, no one to meet me?" Evidently no one: there were not half
a dozen people on the flower-bordered platform, and those few
were country folk with bundles and bags. Lawrence strolled out
into the yard, hoping that his servant's incorrigibly lame
English might have led to a misunderstanding. But there was no
vehicle of any kind, and the station master could not recommend a
cab. Countisford was a small village, smaller even than
Chilmark, and owed the distinction of the railway solely to its
being in the flat country under the Plain. "But you don't mean
to say," said Lawrence incredulous, "that I shall have to walk?"

But it seemed there was no help for it, unless he preferred to
sit in the station while a small boy on a bicycle was despatched
to Chilmark for the fly from the Prince of Wales's Feathers; and
in the end Lawrence went afoot, though his expression when faced
with four miles of dusty road would have moved pity in any heart
but that of his little valet. Hyde was one of those men who
change their habits when they change their clothes. He did not
care what happened to him when he was out of England, following
the Alaskan trail in eighty degrees of frost, or thrashing round