"But if you want to see his Lordship," he went on, considering, "about noon would be your best time.""See his Lordship!" repeated Thorpe, with an impatient grin.
"Why I'm a guest here in the house. All I want is something to eat.""A guest," Gafferson repeated in turn, slowly. There was nothing unpleasant in the intonation, and Thorpe's sharp glance failed to detect any trace of offensive intention in his companion's fatuous visage. Yet it seemed to pass between the two men that Gafferson was surprised, and that there were abundant grounds for his surprise.
"Why, yes," said Thorpe, with as much nonchalance as he could summon, "your master is one of my directors.
I've taken a fancy to him, and I'm going to make a rich man of him. He was keen about my seeing his place here, and kept urging me to come, and so finally I've got away over Sunday to oblige him. By the way--I shall buy an estate in the country as soon as the right thing offers, and I shall want to set up no end of gardens and greenhouses and all that. I see that I couldn't come to a better man than you for advice. I daresay I'll put the whole arrangement of it in your hands. You'd like that, wouldn't you?""Whatever his Lordship agrees to," the gardener replied, sententiously. He turned to the staging, and took up one of the pots.
Thorpe swung on his heel, and moved briskly toward the further door, which he could see opened upon the lawn.
He was conscious of annoyance with this moon-faced, dawdling Gafferson, who had been afforded such a splendid chance of profiting by an old acquaintanceship--it might even be called, as things went in Honduras, a friendship--and who had so clumsily failed to rise to the situation.
The bitter thought of going back and giving him a half-crown rose in Thorpe's inventive mind, and he paused for an instant, his hand on the door-knob, to think it over.
The gratuity would certainly put Gafferson in his place, but then the spirit in which it was offered would be wholly lost on his dull brain. And moreover, was it so certain that he would take it? He had not said "sir" once, and he had talked about medals with the pride of a scientist.
The rules were overwhelmingly against a gardener rejecting a tip, of course, but if there was no more than one chance in twenty of it, Thorpe decided that he could not afford the risk.
He quitted the greenhouse with resolution, and directed his steps toward the front of the mansion. As he entered the hall, a remarkably tuneful and resonant chime filled his ears with novel music. He looked and saw that a white-capped, neatly-clad domestic, standing with her back to him beside the newel-post of the stairs, was beating out the tune with two padded sticks upon some strips of metal ranged on a stand of Indian workmanship. The sound was delightful, but even more so was the implication that it betokened breakfast.
With inspiration, he drew forth the half-crown which he had been fingering in his pocket, and gave it to the girl as she turned. "That's the kind of concert I like,"he declared, bestowing the patronage of a jovial smile upon her pleased and comely face. "Show me the way to this breakfast that you've been serenading about."Out in the greenhouse, meanwhile, Gafferson continued to regard blankly the shrivelled, fatty leaves of the plant he had taken up. "Thorpe," he said aloud, as if addressing the tabid gloxinia--"Thorpe--yes--Iremember his initials--J. S. Thorpe. Now, who's the man that told me about him? and what was it he told me?"
