Lionel interviewed the Mucklows upon the Sunday preceding Lady Margot’s arrival.
He tried chaff first, and then serious remonstrance. The youngest of the three, so Lionel remembered, had announced his wish of becoming a gamekeeper, a calling for which he had special aptitudes. Lionel said to him:
“I thought, George, you wanted to be a keeper?”
George, somewhat to the consternation of his elder brethren, replied with a grin:
“Lard love ’ee, Master Lionel, it looks, seemin’ly, as if keepers an’ game-preservin’ won’t last another ten years. Where would I be then?”
“Rubbish!” exclaimed Lionel.
George accepted this deferentially, adding, as if in excuse:
“I’d a mind to be a policeman, I had, bein’—so to speak —so fine a figger of a man, but policemen bain’t wanted in Nether-Applewhite.”
“You say that as if you regretted it.”
“’Tis tarnation dull here, Master Lionel.”