The Thousandth Woman

by E. W. Hornung

Then they landed in the old, old inlet. Cazalet knew every knot in the post to which he tied Blanche's canoe.

It was a very different place, this Uplands, from poor old Littleford on the lower reach. The grounds were five or six acres instead of about one, and a house in quite another class stood farther back from the river and very much farther from the road.

The inlet began the western boundary, which continued past the boat-house in the shape of a high hedge, a herbaceous border (not what it had been in the old days), and a gravel path. This path was screened from the lawn by a bank of rhododendrons, as of course were the back yard and kitchen premises, past which it led into the front garden, eventually debouching into the drive. It was the path along which Cazalet led the way this afternoon, and Blanche at his heels was so struck by something that she could not help telling him he knew his way very well.

"Every inch of it!" he said bitterly. "But so I ought, if anybody does."

"But these rhododendrons weren't here in your time. They're the one improvement. Don't you remember how the path ran round to the other end of the yard? This gate into it wasn't made."

"No more it was," said Cazalet, as they came up to the new gate on the right. It was open, and looking through they could see where the old gateway had been bricked. The rhododendrons topped the yard wall at that point, masking it from the lawn, and making on the whole an improvement of which anybody but a former son of the house might have taken more account.

He said he could see no other change. He pretended to recognize the very blinds that were down and flapping in the kitchen windows facing west. But for the fact that these windows were wide open, the whole place seemed as deserted as Littleford; but just past the windows, and flush with them, was the tradesmen's door, and the two trespassers were barely abreast of it when this door opened and disgorged a man.

The man was at first sight a most incongruous figure for the back premises of any house, especially in the country. He was tall, rather stout, very powerfully built and rather handsome in his way; his top-hat shone like his patent-leather boots, and his gray cutaway suit hung well in front and was duly creased as to the trousers; yet not for one moment was this personage in the picture, in the sense in which Hilton Toye had stepped into the Littleford picture.

"May I ask what you're doing here?" he demanded bluntly of the male intruder.

"No harm, I hope," replied Cazalet, smiling, much to his companion's relief. She had done him an injustice, however, in dreading an explosion when they were both obviously in the wrong, and she greatly admired the tone he took so readily. "I know we've no business here whatever; but it happens to be my old home, and I only landed from Australia last night. I'm on the river for the first time, and simply had to have a look round."