"If you pay heed to the real meanings of words, no place on earth merits that description," said Mr. Armathwaite.
Walker was no whit abashed.
"Well, no," he grinned.
"I ought to have asked sooner, but have you brought any keys?"
The agent instinct warned the other that his choice of an adjective had been unwise in more ways than one.
"That's all right, sir," he said cheerfully. "The keys are kept in the village—at Mrs. Jackson's. She's a useful old body. If you want a housekeeper, she and her daughter would suit you down to the ground."
Little more was said until the steaming pony was pulled up in front of a thatched cottage. Seen thus intimately, and in the blaze of a June sun, Elmdale suggested coziness. Each house, no matter what its size, had a garden in front and an orchard behind. Long, narrow pastures ran steeply up to the moor, and cattle and sheep were grazing in them. There were crops on the lower land. For all its remoteness, Elmdale faced south, and its earth was fertile.
Armathwaite sat in the dog-cart while James Walker ran up the strip of flower-laden garden, and peered in through a low doorway. In later days, the singular fact was borne in on Armathwaite that had his companion adopted any other method of making known his business—had he, for instance, shouted to Mrs. Jackson or her daughter, Betty, and asked for the keys of the Grange—the whole course of his subsequent life would unquestionably have been altered. A loose stone under the foot of an emperor's horse may change the map of the world. In this instance, a remarkable, and, in some respects, unique series of events arose solely from the fact that Walker, junior, was of active habit, and alighted from the vehicle in preference to announcing his wishes for others to hear; because Betty Jackson, at that moment, was plucking gooseberries in the back garden, and knew nothing of what was going on until a country maid's belated wit failed completely to stem the tide of circumstance.
Armathwaite caught scraps of a brief but seemingly heated argument going on inside the cottage. It was couched in the Yorkshire dialect, which he understood, to some extent, but could not speak. Then Walker, a gallant figure in straw hat, gray coat, red waistcoat with gilded buttons, breeches and gaiters and brown boots, strutted into sight. He was red-faced and laughing, and a bundle of keys jingled in one hand.
"Mrs. Jackson's as bad as any of 'em," he cried, springing to his seat and taking the reins from a clip on the dash-board. "Made such a to-do about anyone looking over the house. Asked if you'd heard of the ghost, too. And, blow me, if she didn't pretend she'd mislaid the keys! We wouldn't have got 'em for a deuce of a time if I hadn't twigged 'em hanging on a nail, and grabbed 'em. Then she gave me my name for nothing, I can assure you."