He watched her enter the house and then mechanically lit a cigarette. “Damn!” he said forcibly. “I haven’t said one single thing I meant to, and I’ve said a great many I didn’t mean to at all.” CHAPTER III Foul Play Humblethorne lay late in bed the following day—wallowed in bed would perhaps be a more fitting description of the way in which he shamelessly and luxuriously stretched himself down between the sheets long after his usual time of rising. It was due to no feeling of fatigue; he had slept without stirring and, as the occupant of the adjoining room could have testified if he had been disposed to do so, with a sonorous simplicity. It was due to laziness, self-indulgence unmitigated. He had even gone to the lengths, in order to enjoy his extra hour the more, of getting out and pulling up the blind, so that his eyes might rest comfortably on the sunny meadows outside, and then getting back into bed again, an act which, as all true sluggards will bear witness, denotes the lover of laziness for laziness’s own sake. He heard and vociferously answered the knock of the girl announcing morning and hot water, but took no steps whatever to prevent the latter getting cold outside his door; he was startled from a fugitive dream by the thump of his boots, but again he made no movement to empty the passage. If the truth must be told, it was more than laziness which kept him in bed; it was the truth dimly acknowledged that he had no idea what he was going to do with himself all day long. Somehow those meadows, sun notwithstanding, had an insipidity in his eyes which the vision of them a few days ago in town had certainly lacked. Then he had felt so sure, that it admitted of no question, that he had only to be among them, with nothing to do, to be absolutely happy; already on realization of his vision he found it vaguely unsatisfying. He was, he perceived, no country lark but a very ordinary London sparrow; he was not already bored, but he had a feeling that he very soon might be. At any rate he saw no need to make the day needlessly long; he couldn’t sit indefinitely many hours alone in a meadow. So it happened that when at last he came down to a perfectly cold breakfast—he had forgetfully ordered it to be ready at 8.15, and it had been, within twenty minutes or so—he found the table laid for one and no trace of the surly stranger of the previous evening. That did not depress him and he rang happily for a fresh brew of tea, rang two and three times, but nobody took the least notice, though he could hear a great deal of talking going on in the servants’ quarters. It seemed so animated that he lacked the courage to go and make his wants known, and after a long wait he sat down to his meal in no very good humour, vowing that when next he chose to be lazy he would at any rate have his breakfast brought up to him.