"I'm not proud," said Mr. Milsom. "I like a convivial evening, whether it's in the housekeeper's room or the servants'-hall."
"Then I'll ask leave to-night," answered James Harwood.
He sent a little scrawl to Milsom next day, by the hands of a stable-boy, inviting that gentleman to a social rubber and a friendly supper in the servants'-hall that evening at seven o'clock.
To spend a few hours inside Raynham Castle was the privilege which Black Milsom most desired, and a triumphant grin broke out upon his face, as he deciphered James Harwood's clumsy scrawl.
"How easy it's done," he muttered to himself; "how easy it's done, if a man has only the patience to wait."
The servants'-hall was a pleasant place to live in, but if Mrs. Smithson, the housekeeper, was liberal in her ideas she was also strict, and on some points especially severe; and the chief of these was the precision with which she required the doors of the castle to be locked for the night at half-past ten o'clock.
On more than one occasion, lately, Mrs. Smithson had a suspicion that there was one offender against this rule. The offender in question was Matthew Brook, the head-coachman, a jovial, burly Briton, with convivial habits and a taste for politics, who preferred enjoying his pipe and glass and political discussion in the parlour of the "Hen and Chickens" public-house to spending his evenings in the servants'-hall at Raynham Castle.
He was rarely home before ten; sometimes not until half-past ten; and one never-to-be-forgotten night, Mrs. Smithson had heard him, with her own ears, enter the doors of the castle at the unholy hour of twenty minutes to eleven!
There was one appalling fact of which Mrs. Smithson was entirely ignorant. And that was the fact that Matthew Brook had entered the castle by a little half-glass door on several occasions, half an hour or more after the great oaken door leading into the servants'-hall had been bolted and barred with all due solemnity before the approving eyes of the housekeeper herself.
The little door in question opened into a small ground-floor bed-room, in which one of the footmen slept; and nothing was more easy than for this man to shelter the nightly misdoings of his fellow-servant by letting him slip quietly through his bedroom, unknown to any member of the household.