ordered for ded o'clock, so I suppose id's the
light fadastic toe, Britten. But mide you get your modey--or I'll stop
your salary, sure. Three guideas and what you cad hook for yourself--I
shan't touch that, Britten--I dow how to treat my servants well."

I laughed at this, but didn't say too much for fear he should find out
that he'd got a patch of oil as big as a football on the back of his
beautiful new spring suit, and when he had told me that the party's
name was Faulkland Jones and had given me the number of the house, I
got on with my work again and soon had the three-year-old Napier
running as well as ever she did in all her life. Nor did anything else
happen until ten o'clock that night, at which hour precisely I drove
her up to the house in the Richmond Road, Bayswater, and sent a small
boy to knock at the door.

It was a twopenny-ha'penny shop, and no doubt about it; a two-storied
day-before-yesterday lodging-house, with a bow window like a
Metallurgique bonnet and a door about as big as the top of your
gear-box.

So far as I could see from the road there was only one lamp showing in
the place, and that was on the off-side, so to speak, in a little
window of a bedroom--but the boy said afterwards that there was a glim
in the hall, and he was old enough to have known. Taken altogether,
you wouldn't have offered them thirty pounds a year for the lot unless
you had been a Rothschild with a cook to pension off--and what such
people wanted with a Napier limousine at three guineas the job I really
could not have said. This, however, was no business of mine; so I just
gave the lad a penny and settled myself down in my seat until the
Duchess in the apron should appear.

It wasn't a long time I had to wait, perhaps five minutes, perhaps ten.
I told the police, when they questioned me afterwards, to split the
difference, for none but a policeman could have told you what it had
got to do with my story. When the door did open at last, a couple of
men carrying a basket came down the bit of a garden, and the first of
them wished me "Good evening" very civilly. Then they let the basket
down softly on to the pavement and began to talk to me about it.

"How strong's your roof?" asked the first, speaking with a nasal twang
I couldn't quite place. "Will it take this bit of a basket all right?"

"Why," says I, "it might depend on what you've got inside that same.
Have I come for the washing, or do I drive your pla