but his hearer's attention wandered; obviously, information as to the ways and habits of the local yeomanry was more to Mr. Armathwaite's taste than a "nut's" gushing about a good-looking girl.

Within an hour, after five miles of fair roadway and two of a switchback, mostly rising, Walker pointed with his whip to a thin line of red-tiled houses, here and there a thatched roof among them, nestling at the foot of a gill, or ravine, which pierced the side of a gaunt moorland. Above the hamlet, at the eastern end, rose an old-fashioned stone house, square, with a portico in the center, and a high-pitched roof of stone slabs.

"There's Elmdale," he said, "and that's the Grange. Looks a god-forsaken hole, doesn't it, sir?"

"If you pay heed to the real meanings of words, no place on earth merits that description," said Mr. Armathwaite.

Walker was no whit abashed.

"Well, no," he grinned.

"I ought to have asked sooner, but have you brought any keys?"

The agent instinct warned the other that his choice of an adjective had been unwise in more ways than one.

"That's all right, sir," he said cheerfully. "The keys are kept in the village—at Mrs. Jackson's. She's a useful old body. If you want a housekeeper, she and her daughter would suit you down to the ground."

Little more was said until the steaming pony was pulled up in front of a thatched cottage. Seen thus intimately, and in the blaze of a June sun, Elmdale suggested coziness. Each house, no matter what its size, had a garden in front and an orchard behind. Long, narrow pastures ran steeply up to the moor, and cattle and sheep were grazing in them. There were crops on the lower land. For all its remoteness, Elmdale faced south, and its earth was fertile.

Armathwaite sat in the dog-cart while James Walker ran up the strip of flower-laden garden, and peered in through a low doorway. In later days, the singular fact was borne in on Armathwaite that had his companion adopted any other method of making known his business—had he, for instance, shouted to Mrs. Jackson or her daughter, Betty, and asked for the keys of the Grange—the whole course of his subsequent life would unquestionably have been altered. A loose stone under the foot of 

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