To which Oliver replied desperately:
"Tell Jennings to make it half past three. I am going for a walk."
So he had plunged out through the gates and, once away down the dusty road, he became more and more of a rebel and finally a fugitive.
"I won't go back," he kept saying to himself. "I won't go back."
There was enough money in his pocket to take him home, and there was a train from the junction at three. He could telephone from there, very briefly, that he was going and that Hotchkiss was to send his things. He was beginning to discover some use for a butler, after all.
He trudged on, growing very hot, but feeling more and more relieved at the thought of escape. The way, however, was longer than he had imagined, and three o'clock came, with the station not yet in sight. There was another train at five, he remembered, but thought that it would be better not to spend the intervening time waiting openly on the platform. He would be missed long before then and Jennings and Janet, or perhaps even Cousin Jasper himself, would come to look for him. It would be better for him to cross the nearest meadow and spend the two hours in the woods, or he might settle the question over which he had been wondering, whether there were really fish in that sharp bend of the river.
He climbed a stone wall and dropped knee-deep into a field of hay and daisies. Toward the right, a quarter of a mile away, he could see the house of gray stone standing in the midst of wide, green gardens and approached by an elm-bordered drive. At that very moment he should have been rolling up to the door in Cousin Jasper's big car, to inquire for the much-detested Eleanor Brighton. He made a wry face at the thought and went hurrying down the slope of the hayfield, passed through a grove of oak and maple trees, and reached the river. It was a busy, swift little stream, talking to itself among the tall grasses as the current swept down toward the sea. A rough bridge spanned it just below the bend, and here he could stand and see the fish; for they were there, as he had thought. In the absence of fishing tackle, he could only watch them, but the sound of a car, passing on a road near by, made him hurry on.
Now, he felt, he was away from passers-by indeed! Another stone wall, patterned with lichen, separated him from the briar-filled wilderness of an old, abandoned orchard. Each one of the twisted apple trees looked at least a thousand years of age, so bent, gnarled, and misshapen had it become. Through the straight rows he could look up the slope of the round hill that he had so often watched from Cousin Jasper's garden, he could make out the roof line of the tiny, dilapidated cottage, and could see that the big tree at the summit was an oak. The orchard was a deserted waste and the house seemed uninhabited. Yet just below the summit, the hill was dotted with small, boxlike structures, painted white, that might have been chicken houses, but seemed scarcely large enough. Filled with curiosity, he went forward to investigate, munching, as he went, a yellow June apple that he had picked up in the grass.
A rough lane opened before him, that passed through the orchard and wound up the hill, with its high grass trodden a little as though, after all, people did sometimes pass that way. He had climbed only a little way when he heard voices.
The tumble-down cottage was not empty, as he had thought, for two people were standing in the doorway. He stopped abruptly. The man in worn overalls and the girl beside him, with her bobbed hair, bright eyes, and faded pink gingham apron, did not look like a very forbidding pair. But Oliver's uneasy conscience made him feel that any person he met might guess his plans in some mysterious way and interfere with his escape. Very quietly he turned about and began to hurry down the hill. He had retreated too late, however, for the man had seen him and proceeded to call after him in what seemed a very peremptory tone: