Alas! there was no sign of him nor of any of the Fortescues. Had I known it, half the length of England separated me from the nearest of my old friends. After a time, however, some one did stroll out upon the terrace walk. He was a complete stranger—a short, fat man, with red cheeks and mutton-chop whiskers. He wore a grey bowler, tipped far back upon his head, his thumbs were stuck in the armholes of his gaudy waistcoat, and a long, black cigar was held between his thick lips. He was gazing round him with a complacent air of proprietorship which in some indefinable fashion annoyed me intensely. Suddenly he took the cigar from his lips and shouted loudly, ‘Simpson!’ A man with a bill-hook in his hand came hurrying round from the shrubbery behind the house. The stout man pointed to Jack’s and my pet clump of evergreens. ‘Those shrubs are untidy, Simpson. They want clipping up. Get to work on ’em at once!’ And, to my horror and disgust, Simpson began chopping and carving away at the deodars and arbor vitæ, lopping all the boughs up a man’s height from the ground, and turning the pretty shrubs into the stiff, unnatural likeness of the toy trees in Jack’s youngest brother’s Noah’s Ark. Then, as I looked about me, I began to see that many things had been changed. The laurels were cut close and flat; a number of fine limbs had been sawn from the elms; several new beds of weird pattern had been cut in the splendid century-old turf of the lawn; the gravel paths were all fresh swept; everything had a painfully overtidy appearance. Presently one of the drawing-room French windows was pushed open, and a third person appeared on the scene—a boy about Jack’s age, but how strangely different! He was short, like the elder man, and had the appearance of having but just stepped out of a band-box. His cord riding-breeches were as immaculate as his white cuffs and tall white collar; his brown boots quite gleamed in the autumn sun, and he wore new dogskin gloves. Strolling over towards his father, he began to talk, but we were too far away to hear what they said. After a short time they both turned and came across the lawn towards the kitchen-garden door. ‘I say, Scud, hadn’t we better hook it?’ suggested Rusty. But I was so interested in these new people, who seemed to have usurped the place of my dear Fortescues, that foolishly I replied: ‘No; they’re not coming near us. Keep still, and they’ll never see us.’ The pair had nearly reached the garden door when I heard the boy exclaim something, and they changed the direction of their walk in the direction of the hazels. A swish of bent branches shortly followed. The distance from the garden door down to the angle of the garden wall was not more than thirty yards, and I knew very well that, thick as the bushes were, there was not a ghost of a chance of our remaining undetected if they came poking about in this fashion.