wers came up to the scratch!" He
drummed his fingers on the window of the landau, looking thoughtful and,
as it seemed to me, retrospectively puzzled.

"And did all go smoothly with the clergyman's family?"

"She's been there ever since. I've heard of no trouble. The governess's
reports of her were excellent, I remember Mr. Driver telling me once."

"Well then, we can forget all about Powers."

"Yes, yes," said Cartmell, drumming his fingers still.

"And what was she like?"

Cartmell looked at me, a smile slowly breaking across his broad face.
"Here's the station. Suppose you see for yourself," he suggested.

We had ten minutes to wait before Miss Driver's train was due--we had
been careful to run no risk of not being on the spot to receive her.
Cartmell was at no loss to employ the time. I left him plunging into an
animated discussion of the points of a handsome cob which stood outside
the station: on the handsome cob's back was a boy, no less handsome,
fresh of color and yellow-haired. I knew him to be young Lord Lacey,
heir to the Fillingford earldom, but I had at that time no acquaintance
with him, and passed on into the station, where I paced up and down
among a crowd of loiterers and hasteners--for Catsford was by now a
bustling center whence and whither men went and came at all hours of the
day and most hours of the night. Driver had foreseen that this would
come about! It had come about; he had grown rich; he lay dead. It went
on happening still, and thereby adding to the piles of gold which he
could no longer handle.

Instead of indulging in these trite reflections--to be excused only by
the equal triteness of death, which tends to evoke them--I should have
done well to consider my own position. A man bred for a parson but, for
reasons of his own, averse from adopting the sacred calling, is commonly
not too well fitted for other avocations--unless perhaps he would be a
schoolmaster, and my taste did not lie that way. In default of private
means, an easy berth at four hundred pounds a year may well seem a
godsend. It had assumed some such celestial guise to me when, on the
casual introduction of my uncle one day in London, Mr. Driver had
offered it to me. As his private secretary, I drew the aforementioned
very liberal salary, I had my "office" in the big house on the hill, I
dwelt in the Old Priory (that is to say, in the little dwelling house
built on to the ruinous remains of the ancient foundation),