"Fourth from the left. How kind you are! I shall never be able to thank you for all your interest. And I have a little disused bicycle lamp in my cupboard. It has a red slide. I will flash that--if I need you. Good-bye."
"Good-bye," said Cleek, smiling, and standing bareheaded in the early morning sunshine.
The carriage drove on up the hill, turning at the corner and winding down again into the valley, and from the outer wall of the street upon the opposite side one could watch its progress as one watched the movements of a fly upon an adjacent bank. Cleek crossed the road and stopped there, head bent, arms folded upon the low stone top of the wall. Round along the tortuous hill road it went creeping along, at an incredibly slow pace it seemed from his position above it, on and on and on into the valley, and then up, up, up, the opposite hillside, through bushes and shrubs that screened it now and again from view, and betwixt immense boulders, until eventually it came abreast of the huge wrought-iron gates of the place and passed between them out of sight.
And as it disappeared Cleek turned upon his heel with a deep-drawn sigh.
"Gad! what an inheritance!" he mentally commented as he crossed the road and entered the portals of the inn itself. "Enough to fight for, indeed! Mr. Narkom, old friend, this is one of those subtle things which your middle-class upbringing could never understand. One of those things which belong to the few and the chosen. Heigho! And Esau bartered his birthright for a mess of pottage. She'd fight for it--and so would I! A nice girl--hysterical, high-strung, but full of the pride of race. The fourth window from the left, she said. I'll put Dollops on the job, while I snoop around a bit for myself, and see how the land lies. Mine host might possibly put me wise to a good deal, as our American cousins say."
So he strolled into the bar-parlour, and ordered a tankard of ale, and over it made the acquaintance of that particular specimen of rugged Scotch manhood who was for the time being to be his host.
"Fine views in these parts," said he, conversationally, and in the man-of-the-world-tourist-idiot voice which he affected upon occasions. "My man and myself want to put up here for the fishin', doncherknow. You can fix us in all right, I suppose?"