beginning to discover some use for a butler, after all.

He trudged on, growing very hot, but feeling more and more relieved at
the thought of escape. The way, however, was longer than he had
imagined, and three o'clock came, with the station not yet in sight.
There was another train at five, he remembered, but thought that it
would be better not to spend the intervening time waiting openly on
the platform. He would be missed long before then and Jennings and
Janet, or perhaps even Cousin Jasper himself, would come to look for
him. It would be better for him to cross the nearest meadow and spend
the two hours in the woods, or he might settle the question over which
he had been wondering, whether there were really fish in that sharp
bend of the river.

He climbed a stone wall and dropped knee-deep into a field of hay and
daisies. Toward the right, a quarter of a mile away, he could see the
house of gray stone standing in the midst of wide, green gardens and
approached by an elm-bordered drive. At that very moment he should
have been rolling up to the door in Cousin Jasper's big car, to
inquire for the much-detested Eleanor Brighton. He made a wry face at
the thought and went hurrying down the slope of the hayfield, passed
through a grove of oak and maple trees, and reached the river. It was
a busy, swift little stream, talking to itself among the tall grasses
as the current swept down toward the sea. A rough bridge spanned it
just below the bend, and here he could stand and see the fish; for
they were there, as he had thought. In the absence of fishing tackle,
he could only watch them, but the sound of a car, passing on a road
near by, made him hurry on.

Now, he felt, he was away from passers-by indeed! Another stone wall,
patterned with lichen, separated him from the briar-filled wilderness
of an old, abandoned orchard. Each one of the twisted apple trees
looked at least a thousand years of age, so bent, gnarled, and
misshapen had it become. Through the straight rows he could look up
the slope of the round hill that he had so often watched from Cousin
Jasper's garden, he could make out the roof line of the tiny,
dilapidated cottage, and could see that the big tree at the summit was
an oak. The orchard was a deserted waste and the house seemed
uninhabited. Yet just below the summit, the hill was dotted with
small, boxlike structures, painted white, that might have been chicken
houses, but seemed scarcely large enough