He shut the door as abruptly as he had opened it, and the little curate slid downstairs as if dropped from the banisters. They called him in to tea as he passed, but he did not stop to reply. Hungry but valiant, he tore down the path, sending before him the name of the profession that sets every wheel racing and every hoof at the beat. The chauffeur had his engine started before the passenger was in the car, and leaped back to his seat. They became a very sudden blur in the distance. Whatever his philosophy, the curate certainly had the knack of being always on the spot. Tea finished in the house-place, and Johnson, shouting down a perfect roar of argument and contradiction, was busy illustrating with Harriet’s china just how Wigmore had got his goal, when a cool medical voice broke across the hubbub. “Will somebody kindly tell me who owns this house?” Stubbs took his head out of a teacup, and came forward and said that he did, which was not in the least true, but sounded well. “Then perhaps you will forgive me for asking that it may be kept as quiet as possible? Mr. Wigmore is upstairs, dangerously ill. I doubt if he will live through the night.” He disappeared before anybody’s breath had come back, and the stricken teams hunted hats and coats in a graveyard silence, stealing forth as if from a meeting in the Catacombs. Queer that Stubbs shouldn’t have known!--but then Stubbs never did know anything for two minutes together. Made a chap feel such a bounder, yelling and roaring with a sick man overhead! Certainly, Harriet had vanished clean off the earth; they might have guessed something was up, from that. It had been a queer match altogether; one they wouldn’t be likely to forget in a month of Sundays. The push-bikes crept down into the road, and silently faded away, and a death-like, terrible peace descended upon the farm. The car came back, bringing a local doctor and a nurse, who disappeared upstairs without asking for anybody. The curate had been explicit. He himself stayed outside with the chauffeur, munching a penny bun. Harriet came down into the parlour, and was joined by Stubbs, whose voluble demands for explanation she strangled savagely into silence. Nobody took any notice of either of them. They might not have existed. The shadows were well down in the little room when the hatchet-faced man was heard in the garden, directing the chauffeur to take the curate to the station, and then the door opened, and the strangers came in. Harriet asked “How is he?” and Stubbs looked around and behind him, not recognising the voice. The hatchet-faced man opened the fingers of an expressive hand, and shut them again.