"I wonder which of them does most damage?" said Andrew. "I think I'll stay at home."
None the less he came.
It was not until the car was at the door that I found we were to be favoured with the society of my eldest son, Anthony, in consequence of the facts that (1) the day before had been his ninth birthday, (2) that he had not cried when he met the sweep in the passage, and (3) that for lack of the kitchen fire he had had no birthday cake. Minx, also, was one of us, but as she came as a stowaway, this did not transpire till later, when explanations were superfluous.
It was at the moment of departure that I perceived a donkey-cart, modestly screening itself behind the evergreens on the way to the yard, and one of Flurry Knox's men approached me with Mr. Knox's compliments, and would I lend him the loan of the long ladder? Some two years ago, in a moment of weakness, I had provided myself with a ladder wherewith to attain to the eaveshoots of Shreelane, since when I had found myself in the undesired position of public benefactor. How life without a long ladder had hitherto been possible for my neighbours I was at a loss to imagine, and as I was also at a loss for any valid excuse for refusing to lend it, the ladder enjoyed a butterfly existence of country-house visiting. Its visits to Mr. Knox had been especially lengthy and debilitating. It is, as Mrs. Cadogan is wont to say, the last straw that puts the hump on the camel. The blood suddenly mounted to my brain, and with it came inspiration.
"You can tell Mr. Knox that the eaveshoots of this house are leaking like sieves, and I want the ladder myself."
In the glow of satisfaction kindled by the delivery of this message I started the caravan. The western breeze fanned my brow agreeably, the car purred her satisfaction with our new and only stretch of steam-rolled road, and Anthony was still in the condition of Being Good (a condition, nevertheless, by no means to be relied on, and quite distinct from Goodness).
We ran west, we ran north; we skirted grey and sounding bays of the Atlantic; we climbed high among heathery, stone-besprinkled moors; we lunched by the roadside in the lee of a rick of turf, and Anthony, by this time emerging from the condition of Being Good, broke the Thermos, and flashed his birthday electric torch in Minx's face until she very properly bit him, and Philippa slurred over the incident with impartial chocolate, and said it was time to start.
The region in which the Chicken Farmers had established themselves suggested the nurture of snipe and sea-gulls rather than chickens. It was an indeterminate patchwork of stony knobs of hill and pockets of bog, among which the road humped and sagged, accepting pessimistically the facts of nature. Hardy, noisy hill-streams scurried beside it, or over it, as seemed good to them; finally a sharp turn, a high horizon of sea, and a steep down-hill grade, ending on the shore of a small, round lake. There was a little pink box of a house on its farther side, with a few bunches of trees round it, and among them a pigmy village of prim wooden huts.
"That's the place," said Philippa, who had been there with Lady Derryclare. "And those are the last cry in hen-houses. Now remember, both of you, one of them is a doctor, Scotch, and a theosophist, or something mysterious of that sort; and the pretty one was engaged to a gunner and it was broken off—why, I don't know—drink, I fancy, or mad—so you had better be careful——"
"I shall be guarded in my condolences," I said, turning in at the little gate, with the sensation of being forcibly fed.