od was sure of the place;
he had passed it twenty times in his constitutionals on the bicycle;
he had always dimly felt it was a place where something might occur.
But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face of his
frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time have appeared
over the garden bushes above. The gardener's account,
unlike the curate's, was quite free from decorative adjectives,
however many he may have uttered privately when writing it.
He simply said that on a particular morning Mr. Smith came out
and began to play about with a rake, as he often did. Sometimes he
would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he had two children);
sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of a tree,
and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of
a giant frog in its final agony. Never, apparently, did he think
of putting the rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener,
in consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity.
But the gardener was certain that on one particular morning in October he
(the gardener) had come round the corner of the house carrying
the hose, had seen Mr. Smith standing on the lawn in a striped
red and white jacket (which might have been his smoking-jacket,
but was quite as like a part of his pyjamas), and had heard him then
and there call out to his wife, who was looking out of the bedroom
window on to the garden, these decisive and very loud expressions--

"I won't stay here any longer. I've got another wife and much
better children a long way from here. My other wife's got redder
hair than yours, and my other garden's got a much finer situation;
and I'm going off to them."

With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the sky,
higher than many could have shot an arrow, and caught it again.
Then he cleared the hedge at a leap and alighted on his feet down
in the lane below, and set off up the road without even a hat.
Much of the picture was doubtless supplied by Inglewood's accidental
memory of the place. He could see with his mind's eye that big
bare-headed figure with the ragged rake swaggering up the crooked
woodland road, and leaving lamp-post and pillar-box behind.
But the gardener, on his own account, was quite prepared to swear
to the public confession of bigamy, to the temporary disappearance
of the rake in the sky, and the final disappearance of the man up
the road. Moreover, being a local man, he could swear t