CHAPTER VI
ncle Bond, as it proved, had been waiting for him, all the time, at the garage.
The little man had run the King's car, out of the garage, into the drive. Already seated himself in the car, he looked up, as the King approached, with a mischievous twinkle in his spectacled eyes, and a droll smile puckering his round, double-chinned, clean-shaven face.
"Good morning, my boy, I'm going to see you along the main road, for a mile or two," he announced. "I shall have to walk back. That will be good for me. Judith says I'm getting fat! Thought I was cutting you, didn't you? I thought that I'd stage a little surprise for you. Astonishment is good for the young. It is the only means we old fogies have left, nowadays, of keeping you youngsters properly humble. The Imps have taught me that! Jump in! I want to talk to you."
The King looked at the corpulent little man, and laughed.
"I was feeling absurdly disappointed, because I hadn't seen you, Uncle Bond," he confessed.
Putting on his thick leather motor coat, and adjusting his goggles, which the little man had placed in readiness for him, on the vacant seat at the steering wheel, the King got into the car, and started the engine.
"The first mile in silence!" Uncle Bond directed. "If possible I have got to assume an unaccustomed air of gravity. And drive slowly. The subtlety of that suggestion probably escapes you. A bar or two of slow music and—enter emotion! When I chuckle again, you can change your gear."
Away from the house, down the short, sunlit drive, and out into, and up, the narrow tree-shadowed lane beyond, the King drove slowly, and in silence, as the little man had directed.