The car, an expensive touring model, drew up at the gate. The driver was a big man with dark gray eyes, regular features and a dark mustache. It was a handsome head, but not wholly pleasant; in the accepted phrase, he had evidently lived hard. Denis with unerring fastidiousness put him down as a bounder. Beside him sat a lady, muffled up in a long dust-cloak and a veil, and there was a maid behind.
"How far on is it to Keswick?" asked the driver, leaning out to address Gardiner with careless incivility.
"Nine miles."
"Nine, eh? Are you the proprietor of this place?" He looked the young man up and down with cursory interest. "Well, we may want rooms for the night. Can you do us?"
"The house is rather full, but I can show you what I have."
"What do you say, Dot? We can't get on to Keswick to-night on this confounded tire. Might as well stop, do you think? Of course it's a wretched little hole, but we haven't much choice." The aside was wholly audible both to Gardiner and to Denis.
"I don't care, provided it's clean," said the girl. Her features were invisible behind her veil, but the voice sounded young.
"What? Oh yes, I should say it's fairly clean. Yes, we'll stay," he added, turning to the owner of the fairly clean hotel. "No, never mind the rooms, we'll have dinner at once. Here, and send some one round to see after my car, will you? That tire's punctured."
"Very good, sir," said Gardiner, standing aside for the lady to pass in. Her husband followed, and they were lost to view. Denis remained fuming on the veranda. It was one thing to put on airs himself, another to see them on somebody else. Besides, Denis was always scrupulously courteous to inferiors; he considered it bad form to hit a man who was debarred from hitting back. He hoped the new-comers would not stay; but time passed, and nobody appeared except a man to take the Rolls-Royce to the garage; and presently the gong sounded, and Denis went in.
At the back of the hotel two wings jutted out from the main block, forming three sides of a quadrangle; and in the right wing, just at the corner, Gardiner had his den. It looked, of course, directly across the garden into the windows opposite, but the house did not shut out all the view. Sitting sideways, one could see the broad green vale running westwards and narrowing swiftly to a gorge, down which the stream tumbled, white as milk. Dark gray the hills were, slate-gray, almost purple, with emerald verdure worn thin in places and showing the naked rock—Helm Crag, Seat Sandal, Dollywagon Pike, St. Sunday Crag, Silver How, what names of romance! A sweet and pleasant scene, in this summer twilight; mists upstealing along the brook, and a half-transparent moon sharpening into silver as she sank into the lemon-colored west. When the sounds of the house for a moment lulled, one could hear the murmur of the cascade which seemed to hang motionless against the rock, flattened out like a skein of white wool.