“Good Lord!” he thought, as he turned into Pond Lane. “If all he feels for his assistants when they die at their post is anger like that, he must be a queer chap to deal with. Or did he mean something quite different? Dead? Dead? But that wasn’t the word he used. What was the word he used?” And he continued worrying over the windblown sarcasm he had caught in the doorway, without coming to any solution of the riddle. “If it wasn’t that he meant the fellow was dead, what did he mean?”

His mind was so full of this problem that he arrived at the gate into the small garden of Pond Cottage before he was aware of it. There was a faint reddish light in the window of what he knew was his own bedroom. “She’s given me a fire!” he thought to himself; and he looked forward with keen anticipation to his first night in Dorset after twenty-five years.