“Yes, sir, very pretty; Mr. Chase puts them there,” said Fortune, with the satisfaction of one who adds a final touch to a suggestive sketch. “Shouldn’t have thought he’d ever looked at a flower in his life,” muttered Nutley. He deposited his bag on the table, and turned to the butler. “Quite between you and me, Fortune, what you tell me surprises me very much—about the visiting parties, I mean. And the padlock. Um—the padlock. I always thought Mr. Chase very _quiet_; but you don’t, do you, think him _soft_?” Fortune knew that Nutley enjoyed saying that. He remembered how he had caught Chase, the day before, studying bumbledories on the low garden wall; but he withheld the bumbledories from Mr. Nutley. “It wouldn’t be unnatural, sir,” he submitted, “if Mr. Chase had a feeling about Blackboys being in the market?” “Feeling? pooh!” said Mr. Nutley. He said “Pooh!” again to reassure himself, because he knew that Fortune, stupid, sentimental, and shrewd, had hit the nail on the head. “He’d never set eyes on Blackboys until three weeks ago. Besides, what could he do with the place except put it in the market? Tell me that? Absurd!” He was sorting papers out of his black bag. Their neat stiffness gave him the reassuring sense of being here among matters which he competently understood. This was his province. He would have said, had he been asked a day earlier, that it was Chase’s province too. Now he was not so sure. “Sentimentality!” he snorted. It was his most damning criticism. Chase’s pipe was lying on the table beside the tulips; he picked it up and regarded it with a mixture of reproach and indignation. It reposed mutely in his hand. “Ridiculous!” said Nutley, dashing it down again as though that settled the matter. “The people round here have taken to him wonderful,” put in Fortune. Nutley looked sharply at him; he stood by the table, demure, grizzled, and perfectly respectful. “Why, has he been round talking to the people?” “A good deal, sir, among the tenants like. Wonderful how he gets on with them, for a city-bred man. I don’t hold with city-breeding, myself. Will you be staying to luncheon, sir?” “Yes,” replied Mr. Nutley, preoccupied and profoundly suspicious. VII