It was on the top of this hill that he lighted, and here he paused for a while and filled his eyes with the humble beauty of the home which his earth mind had conceived and achieved.
Beyond the garden carpeted with jonquils and narcissuses between and above graceful pyramids of pear blossoms, the house, low and rambling, with many chimneys, gleamed in the sunlight. It was a heavenly day.
From the hill he could see not only the house, but to the left the garage and beyond that the stable. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, and it seemed queer to him that at that hour and at that season there should be no sign of life anywhere. Surely the gardener and his assistant ought to be at work. He turned a puzzled and indignant glance back upon the garden, and he observed a curious phenomenon.
A strip of soil in the upper left hand corner of the garden was being turned and broken by a spade. Near by a fork was taking manure from a wheelbarrow and spreading it over the roots of a handsome crab apple.
Both the spade and the fork appeared to be performing these meritorious acts without the aid of any human agency.
And Derrick knew at once that McIntyre, the gardener, and Chubb, his assistant, must, since his departure, have sinned in their own eyes, so that they could now no longer show themselves to him, or he to them.
He started anxiously toward the house, but a familiar sound arrested him.
The blue roadster, hitting on all its cylinders, came slowly out of the garage and descended the hill and crossed the bridge and honked its horn for the mill corner and sped off along the county road toward Stamford all by itself.
There was nobody in the roadster. He could swear to that.
And this meant, of course, that Britton, the chauffeur, had done something which he knew that he ought not to have done, and was for ever separated from those who had gone beyond.