Uncle Bond threw off his unusual abstraction, in a moment, and scrambled, nimbly enough, out of the car.
The little man tested the car door carefully, to make sure that he had fastened it securely behind him.
Then he looked up at the King, with an odd, provocative twinkle in his mischievous, spectacled eyes.
"If I were you, Alfred, I should fight for my place in the procession, if necessary," he remarked. "Fight for your place, if necessary, my boy! After all, you are young, and they have just given you—promotion. I have a shrewd suspicion that you would not be satisfied, for long, by the view from our window, in the quiet, old-fashioned, inn of 'Content.' You would soon want to alter the signboard inscription, I fancy. An occasional glance through the window is all very well. It is restful. It serves its purpose. But a taste for the stir the bustle, the jostling, and the dust and the clamour, in the market-place, is pretty deeply implanted in all of us. To be in the movement! It is, almost, the universal disease. A man, who is a man, a young man, wants to be in the thick of things, in the hurly-burly, in the street below. What is there for him in a window view? Fight for your place, if necessary, my boy! And, if you decide to fight, fight with a good grace, and with all your heart. It is the half-hearted men, it is the half-hearted women, who fail. The best places in the procession—whether they are at the head or the tail, and where the head and the tail are, who knows?—like the best seats at the inn windows, in the background, fall to the men, fall to the women, who know what they want, who know their own mind.
"But, now, I must walk!"
And with that, and with no other leave-taking, Uncle Bond swung round abruptly, and set off, with surprising swiftness, for so small, and so corpulent a man, straight back along the road.
Automatically, the King restarted the car.
Then he turned in his seat, to wave his hand, in farewell, to Uncle Bond.
But Uncle Bond did not look round.
The King glanced at his watch. It was already half past seven. He had a good deal of time to make up. But he could do it. He opened out the car, now, to its fullest extent. The powerful engine responded, at once, to his touch, and the car shot forward—out of Paradise into Hades!