The room was small, it had a big window in the left wall, a fireplace opposite, and a table between, on which stood a packing-case in a litter of straw. Gardiner had been opening a case of whisky for Denis, who liked to fancy himself a connoisseur.
"Do you trot round after everybiddy as you did with those people to-night?" he asked gloomily. Dinner had passed since the scene on the terrace, but it had not buried his resentment.
"Not as a rule I don't. Miss Marvin, my housekeeper, who's a real treasure, she's supposed to see to visitors. But I do it when I want to. Is it the Trents rankling still? I rather enjoyed them."
"Is his name Trent?"
"His name is Trent. Major Trent, D.S.O., and wife, of Thurlow Park, Surrey; he inscribed it in the visitors' book. That's him you hear overhead; they dined upstairs. I've had to put them in the old part of the house, every other corner is full. I don't know what'll happen when he sees his bedroom."
"A line regiment, of course," said Denis, gloomily scornful. "No decent corps would stand him. I wish you'd kick him out."
"That, my young friend, is not the spirit in which one runs a successful hotel. Do you know he's paying me upwards of three guineas a day? Besides, he didn't mean to be rude, he was simply talking over my head. What am I to him? The landlord of a third-rate inn. I'd give myself airs too if I had a place in Surrey and a 1912 Rolls-Royce."
"Insufferable bounder!" said Denis. Gardiner laughed.
"No, no; that he's not. Rather a fine head—a good man gone wrong. Oddly enough, I believe Tom knew him in India. If it's the same man, he got his D.S.O. in South Africa, a very gallant piece of work, and then had to send in his papers because of some row about a woman—a subaltern's wife, to make things pleasant all round. Tom rather liked him, bar his little weakness for the sex. But he must have come into money since—through his wife, I wouldn't mind betting, and that's why he's so civil to her. For he's the sort who's usually more civil to other people's wives."