Arriving at the cottage, I found a man prostate on the road, dead drunk—and the Cur's servant looking at him.
"May I ask something?" the man said. "Have you been having my master watched?"
"Yes."
"Bad news, in that case, sir. Your man there is a drunken vagabond; and my master has gone to London by the first train."
When I had recovered the shock, I denied, for the sake of my own credit, that the brute on the road could be a servant of mine.
"Why not, sir?"
"Do you think I should have been kept in ignorance of it, if my gamekeeper had been a drunkard? His fellow servants would have warned me."
The man smiled. "I'm afraid, sir, you don't know much about servants. It's a point of honor among us never to tell tales of each other to our masters."
I began to wish that I had never left Germany. The one course to take now was to tell the lawyer what had happened. I turned away to get back, and drive at once to the town. The servant remembered, what I had forgotten—the five pound note.
"Wait and hear my report, sir," he suggested.