Wolf looked at him in astonishment. “You don’t like it here, Monk,” he murmured.

“Like it?” The man’s voice sank to a whisper. “ ’Tis easier to enter a gentleman’s service than to leave it, Sir, when that gentleman be the sort of Nebuchadnezzar my master be!”

“You aren’t a Dorset man, then?” enquired Wolf.

“I were born here,” replied the other, “but I left home when I were a kiddie, and worked in they Shires.”

This remark made clear to Wolf a great deal about Roger Monk. The upper layers of the man’s mind were sophisticated by travel. The deeper ones retained their indigenous imprint.