"Right you are, sir!"
Someone shouted. It was Miggles, breast-high beyond a hedge. At that instant Armathwaite caught sight of a dog-cart swinging into Elmdale. A gallant figure at the reins seemed somehow familiar. Therefore, instead of describing the kind of bath he wished Tom Bland to bring from an ironmonger's, he said sharply to the postman:
"Who is that in the dog-cart?"
"Young Mr. Walker, o' Nuttonby, sir," was the answer.
James Walker! The man whom Marguérite Ogilvey said she hated, and such a phrase on a girl's lips with reference to a man like Walker almost invariably means that she has been pestered by his attentions. The Grange was nearly a mile distant, and Walker was now dashing through the village street.
"Damn!" said Armathwaite, making off at top speed.
Miggles gazed after him.
"Rum houses draws rum coves," he said, trudging away on his daily round. "Not that he's the first who's damned young Jimmy Walker, not by a jolly long way!"
Evidently, an Aristotelian postman.