He had passed in at the gate in full view of a couple of girls of his acquaintance, and knew that they were glancing over a yew hedge when the front door opened and he was admitted. He was shown into a library, where Mr. Dobb awaited him. The lawyer motioned him to a chair. "Now, Mr. Walker," he said curtly, "would you mind telling me exactly what happened at Elmdale this afternoon?" James sat down. Unfortunately, the furniture provided a placid harmony in oak, so the seat of the chair was hard, even though it shone with the subdued polish of a hundred years of careful use and elbow grease applied by many generations of vigorous housemaids. "With your permission, sir, I--er--think I'd better begin--er--a little earlier." "What's the matter? Isn't that chair comfortable?" Mr. Dobb was clerk to the magistrates in the Nuttonby Petty Sessions; his pet abhorrence was a fidgety witness, and Walker was obviously ill at ease. "The fact is, sir, I'm a bit saddle-galled. If you don't mind----" "Certainly. Take that easy chair. What occurred 'a little earlier' which you think I ought to know?" Walker had been disagreeably reminded of Armathwaite, but he kept a venomous tongue well under control. He told the lawyer the circumstances under which Armathwaite, confessedly a complete stranger, had entered into the tenancy of the Grange, and described the journey to Elmdale, together with the curious behavior of the Jackson family. He was scrupulously accurate in his account of the cause and extent of his visit that day, even going so far as to admit that there was "a sort of a scuffle" between Armathwaite and himself. Mr. Dobb listened in silence. At the end, he fixed a singularly penetrating glance on the narrator. "In plain English, I suppose," he said, "this man, Armathwaite, bundled you out neck and crop?" "No, sir. Not exactly that. But I couldn't fight him in Miss Meg's presence." "Yet, from what you have told me, I gather that Mr. Armathwaite is a gentleman?" "He has all the airs of one," said Walker. "And he must have thought you had behaved discourteously to his cousin before he would use actual violence towards you!" "Nothing of the sort, sir. Miss Meg jumped down my throat for no reason whatever. Of course, Mr. Armathwaite hadn't heard the beginning of it, and may have imagined I was to blame, but I wasn't." "Perhaps there is an explanation that may be news to you. You are not aware, I take it, that Mrs. Garth is now Mrs. Ogilvey?" "By jing!" cried Walker, rather forgetting himself, "that's the name Tom Bland tried to tell me, but he couldn't rightly get his tongue round it."