“Very annoying⁠—I hope, indeed, I shall do better, Sir! You had to get rid of him, then?”

The wind whistled past him as he spoke, so that his host’s final word was scarcely audible. In fact, the last thing he saw of Mr. Urquhart was a feeble attempt the man seemed to be making to cover his rotund stomach with the flaps of his dress-suit.

When at last the great door had really closed between them and he was striding down the stone steps, he found his mind full of the impression which that inarticulate final word had made upon him; and before he reached the end of the drive and passed through the iron gates into Lenty Lane, he had come to the startling conclusion that his predecessor in the study of Dorset Chronicles had died, as they say in that county, “in the het of his job.”