"Beg pardon, ma'am"--he still remembered his station, and it was thus he affirmed it--"beg pardon, ma'am, but this 'ere dawg--" It was too true. Charles, perhaps conscious of his master's presence in the parlor, had slipped his collar, scratched a hole under the stable door, and, finding the groom and the landlord in the passage, barring his entrance, had bitten the groom's trousers leg. It hung, gaping, from knee to ankle--with Charles still attached. Charles's master choked the dog off, but confidential conversation was at an end, even when a sovereign had slipped from his hand to the groom's. "Seems the young lady's missing," said the host, when the dog-cart had rattled up the street. "Indeed!" said Edward. "Well, I think I also shall retreat. Will it inconvenience you if I leave my traps to be sent on? I shall walk into Seaford and catch the early train." "It wasn't my fault the lady come, sir," said the landlord, sulky but deferential. "I know it," said the guest, "and I am not leaving because of her coming. I should have left in any case. But it is a fine night, I have a fancy for a walk, and it does not seem worth while to go to bed again. If you will kindly take this, pay your bill out of it, and divide the remainder between Robert and Gladys, I shall be very much obliged. I've been very comfortable here and I shall certainly come again." He pressed a five-pound note into the landlord's hand, and before that bewildered one could think of anything more urgent than the commonplaces which begin, "I'm sure, sir," or, "I shouldn't like to think," he and Charles had turned their backs on the Five Bells, and the landlord was staring after them. The round, white back of Charles showed for quite a long time through the darkness. Slowly he drew the bolts, put out the lights, and went back to bed. "It's a rum go," he told his wife, after he had told her all he had heard and overheard, "a most peculiar rum go. But he's a gentleman, he is, whichever way you look at it. Miss up at the Hall might do a jolly sight worse, if you ask me. Shouldn't wonder, come to think of it, if she ain't waiting for him around the corner, as it is." "He's the kind of gentleman a girl _would_ wait around the corner for," said the landlady. "It's his eyes, partly, I think. And he's got such a kind look. But if she is--waiting round the corner, I mean, like what you said--he _have_ got a face to go on like what he did to Miss Davenant." "Yes," said the landlord, blowing out the candle, "he _have_ got a face, whichever way you look at it." It was bright daylight when a motor--one of the strong, fierce kind, no wretched taxicab, but a private motor of obvious speed and spirit--blundered over the shoulder of the downs down the rutty road to Crow's Nest Farm.