"It won't do any good," said Hilda, who was direct to say the least. "She's gone to bed. My orders is not to disturb her."
"Are they her orders or Mrs. Strong's orders?" demanded Courtney, driven to exasperation.
"All I can say, sir, is they're MY orders, sir," replied Hilda, quite succinctly.
"All right," said he curtly. Then, as an afterthought: "Please say that I stopped in to see if I could be of any further service to Miss Crown, will you, Hilda?"
He was very much crestfallen as he made his way down the steps to the lane. This wasn't at all what he had expected.
There were a number of people near the gate. Instead of going directly down the walk, he turned to the right at the bottom of the terrace and cut diagonally across the lawn. Coming to one of the big oaks he sat down for a moment on the rustic seat that encircled its base. Sheltered from the wind he managed to strike a match and light a cigarette. Assured that no one was near, he leaned over and felt with his hand under the bench. His fingers closed upon an object wedged between the seat and one of the slanting supports. Quickly withdrawing it, he dropped it into his overcoat pocket, and, after a moment, resumed his progress, making for the carriage gate in the left lower corner of the grounds.
He had a sharp eye out for Rosabel Vick. He heard Annie Jordan's high-pitched voice in the road ahead of him and slackened his pace. In due time he limped up the steps of Dowd's Tavern.
Several women were in the "lounge," chattering like magpies in front of the fire. There were no men about. He went in and for ten minutes listened to the singing of his praises. Then, requesting a pitcher of hot water, he hobbled upstairs, politely declining not only the Misses Dowd's offer to bathe and bandage his heroic knee, but Miss Grady's bottle of witchhazel, Miss Miller's tube of Baume Analgesique and old Mrs. Nichols' infallible remedy for every ailment under the sun,—a flaxseed poultice.
The first thing he did on entering his room was to open his trunk and deposit therein the shiny object he had recovered from its hiding-place under the tree-seat. Before hanging his hat on the clothes-tree in the corner of the room, he thoughtfully examined the bullet hole in the crown.
"Thirty-eight calibre, all right," he reflected. Poking his forefinger through the hole, he enlarged it to some extent. "More like a forty-four now," he said in a satisfied tone.