Still crawling, he reached the shelter of the belt of trees and then rose and made swiftly for the gate, and out into the road. As he passed under a lamp, his face wore a totally new expression, compounded of wonder, excitement, and urgent thought. He was walking swiftly, and his pace never slackened, nor did the keenness leave his face, till he was back at the door of the Kings Arms Hotel. Before he entered, he took off his hat and turned up the brim again, and his manner when he tapped at the door of the manageress' room was perfectly sedate. He let it appear, however, that he had some slight matter on his mind. "What is the name of Mr. Rattar's head clerk?" he enquired. "An oldish, prim looking man, with side whiskers." "Oh, that will be Mr. Ison," said the manageress. "I have just remembered a bit of business I ought to have seen about to-night," he continued. "I can't very well call on Mr. Rattar himself at this hour, but I was thinking of looking up Mr. Ison if I could discover his whereabouts." "The boots will show you the way to his house," said she, and rang the bell. While waiting for the boots, Mr. Carrington asked another casual question or two and learned that Mr. Ison had been in the office since he was a boy. No man knew the house of Rattar throughout its two generations better than Mr. Ison, said Miss Peterkin; and she remembered afterwards that this information seemed to give Mr. Carrington peculiar satisfaction. He seemed so gratified, indeed, that she wondered a little at the time. And then the visitor and the boots set out together for the clerk's house, and at what hour her guest returned she was not quite sure. The boots, it seemed, had been instructed to wait up for him, but she had long gone to bed. XXXVI THE WALKING STICK Had there been, next morning, any curious eyes to watch the conduct of the gentleman who had come to rent a sporting estate, they would probably have surmised that he had found something to please his fancy strangely, and yet that some perplexity still persisted. They would also have put him down as a much more excitable, and even demonstrative, young man than they had imagined. On a lonely stretch of shore hard by the little town he paced for nearly an hour, his face a record of the debate within, and his cane gesticulating at intervals. Of a sudden he stopped dead and his lips moved in a murmured ejaculation, and then after standing stock still for some minutes, he murmured again: "Ten to one on it!"