“Come any more of your tricks—and look out!” he challenged. “You’ll find a Stott—”
Eline clutched his arm frenziedly.
“Oh sir—there’s somebody there!”
Undoubtedly there was somebody there; a light was showing in the front room, a red and uncertain light. And then a door closed loudly.
“Somebody there—?”
Mr. Stott strode down the steps furiously. Even when he strode down a step that wasn’t there, he did not lose his poise.
“Somebody there—?”
He remembered mistily that the gardener had a lazy habit of leaving his spade beneath the trimmed hedge that marked the boundaries of his property.
“You’ll catch your death of cold, dear,” wailed Eline outrageously.
But Mr. Stott neither observed the uncalled-for endearment, nor the rain that soaked him, nor the wind that flapped his dressing-gown loose. He groped for the spade and found it, just as a car came smashing through the frail gate of Mayfield.