“Yes, Sir. And did you ’appen to see them upstairs too?”
“At the upper window? Yes.”
“Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?”
“A little before that. Why d’you want to know?”
He paused a little. “Only to make sure that—that they had seen the car, Sir, because with children running about, though I’m sure you’re driving particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir. Here are the cross-roads. You can’t miss your way from now on. Thank you, Sir, but that isn’t our custom, not with——”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, and thrust away the British silver.
“Oh, it’s quite right with the rest of ’em as a rule. Goodbye, Sir.”
He retired into the armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.
Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with motor cars had small right to live—much less to “go about talking like carriage folk.” They were not a pleasant-mannered community.
When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser. Hawkin’s Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my difficulty to a neighbour—a deep-rooted tree of that soil—and he gave me a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.