he told me that you were coming this
afternoon."

"Oh!" He looked round the room. "What d'you call this place, eh?"

"The office, sir."

"The office?"

"The room where the master works, sir."

"Works, eh? That's new. Didn't know he'd ever done a stroke of work in
his life."

"Where he writes, sir," said Audrey, with dignity. The fact that Mr.
Mark "wrote," though nobody knew what, was a matter of pride in the
housekeeper's room.

"Not well-dressed enough for the drawing-room, eh?"

"I will tell the master you are here, sir," said Audrey decisively.

She closed the door and left him there.

Well! Here was something to tell auntie! Her mind was busy at once,
going over all the things which he had said to her and she had said to
him--quiet-like. "Directly I saw him I said to myself--" Why, you could
have knocked her over with a feather. Feathers, indeed, were a perpetual
menace to Audrey.

However, the immediate business was to find the master. She walked
across the hall to the library, glanced in, came back a little
uncertainly, and stood in front of Cayley.

"If you please, sir," she said in a low, respectful voice, "can you tell
me where the master is? It's Mr. Robert called."

"What?" said Cayley, looking up from his book. "Who?"

Audrey repeated her question.

"I don't know. Isn't he in the office? He went up to the Temple after
lunch. I don't think I've seen him since."

"Thank you, sir. I will go up to the Temple."

Cayley returned to his book.

The "Temple" was a brick summer-house, in the gardens at the back of
the house, about three hundred yards away. Here Mark meditated sometimes
before retiring to the "office" to put his thoughts upon paper. The
thoughts were not of any great value; moreover, they were given off at
the dinner-table more often than they got on to paper, and got on to
paper more often than they got into print. But that did not prevent
the master of The Red House from being a little pained when a visitor
treated the Temple carelessly, as if it had been erected for the
ordinary purposes of flirtation and cigarette-smoking. There had been an
occasion when two of his guests had been found playing fives in it. Mark
had said nothing at the time, save to ask with a little less than his
usual point--whether they couldn't find anywhere else for their game,
but the offenders were never asked to The Red House again.

Audrey walked slowly up to the Temple, looked in and walked slowl