"To keep him quiet in the meantime. Next I should like you to send a little note to Mr Irons--your maid could deliver it also to-night, I dare say?" "Irons! Irons the gardener?" "Yes," apologetically. "Only a line or two, you know. Just saying that, after all, if he cares to come on Monday you can find him a few days' work." "But in any circumstances I don't want him." "No; I can quite believe that you could do better. Still, it doesn't matter, as he won't come, Mrs Bellmark; not for half-a-crown a day, believe me. But the thought will tend to make Mr Irons less restive also. Lastly, will you persuade your husband not to decline his firm's offer until Monday?" "Very well, Mr Carrados," she said, after a moment's consideration. "You are Uncle Louis's friend and therefore our friend. I will do what you ask." "Thank you," said Carrados. "I shall endeavour not to disappoint you." "I shall not be disappointed because I have not dared to hope. And I have nothing to expect because I am still completely in the dark." "I have been there for nearly twenty years, Mrs Bellmark." "Oh, I am sorry!" she cried impulsively. "So am I--occasionally," he replied. "Good-bye, Mrs Bellmark. You will hear from me shortly, I hope. About the hawthorn, you know." It was, indeed, in something less than forty-eight hours that she heard from him again. When Bellmark returned to his toy villa early on Saturday afternoon Elsie met him almost at the gate with a telegram in her hand. "I really think, Roy, that everyone we have to do with here goes mad," she exclaimed, in tragi-humorous despair. "First it was Mr Johns or Jones--if he is Johns or Jones--and then Irons who wanted to work here for half of what he could get at heaps of places about, and now just look at this wire that came from Mr Carrados half-an-hour ago." This was the message that he read: _Please procure sardine tin opener mariner's compass and bottle of champagne. Shall arrive 6.45 bringing Crataegus Coccinea._--CARRADOS. "Could anything be more absurd?" she demanded. "Sounds as though it was in code," speculated her husband. "Who's the foreign gentleman he's bringing?" "Oh, that's a kind of special hawthorn--I looked it up. But a bottle of champagne, and a compass, and a sardine tin opener! What possible connexion is there between them?" "A very resourceful man might uncork a bottle of champagne with a sardine tin opener," he suggested. "And find his way home afterwards by means of a mariner's compass?" she retorted. "No, Roy dear, you are not a sleuth-hound. We had better have our lunch." They lunched, but if the subject of Carrados had been tabooed the meal would have been a silent one. "I have a compass on an old watch-chain somewhere," volunteered Bellmark. "And I have a tin opener in the form of a bull's head," contributed Elsie. "But we have no champagne, I suppose?"