This was a pleasant situation, certainly. My hosts vanished. The butler drunk. The servants apparently in rebellion!
Restlessly I paced the hall. My thoughts always work quickly, and my mind was soon made up.
First I went to the telephone, rang up the Stag’s Head Hotel in Oakham, the nearest town—it was eight miles off—and asked the proprietor, whom I knew personally, to send me out a car as quickly as possible, also to reserve a room for me for the night. Then I went into the morning-room, tucked the big panel photograph, in its frame, under my arm, took it up to my room, and deposited it in the bottom of my valise. As I finished packing my clothes and other belongings I heard the car hooting as it came quickly up the long beech avenue leading from the lodge-gates.
My valise was not heavy, and I am pretty strong. Also I am not proud. I lifted it on to my bed, crouched down, hoisted the valise on to my back, as the railway porters do, carried it downstairs, and let the driver have it. He was a man I knew, and I noticed that he was grinning.
“Taking physical exercise, sir?” he asked lightly.
“Yes,” I answered, “it’s better sport than foxhunting.”
He laughed outright, then helped me into my overcoat. A minute later we were on the road to Oakham.
And all the while the sad face of the girl for whom I had that evening declared my love—as I had last seen it, with her eyes set on mine as though in mute appeal—kept rising before me like a vision.