the grass was newly mown
and as short inside the hole as it was all over. No machine could have
made such a job of such a surface, said the son of the house, with a
light in his eyes, but a drop in his voice, which made me wonder whether
he desired or feared the worst.

"What do you want us to do, Mr. Delavoye?" I inquired in my official
capacity.

"I want it dug up, if I can have it done now, while my mother's out of
the way."

That was all very well, but I had only limited powers. My instructions
were to attend promptly to the petty wants of tenants, but to refer any
matter of importance to our Mr. Muskett, who lived on the Estate but
spent his days at the London office. This appeared to me that kind of
matter, and little as I might like my place I could ill afford to risk
it by doing the wrong thing. I put all this as well as I could to my new
friend, but not without chafing his impetuous spirit.

"Then I'll do the thing myself!" said he, and fetched from the yard some
garden implements which struck me as further relics of more spacious
days. In his absence I had come to the same conclusion about a couple of
high-backed Dutch garden chairs and an umbrella tent; and the final bond
of fallen fortunes made me all the sorrier to have put him out. He was
not strong; no wonder he was irritable. He threw himself into his task
with a kind of feeble fury; it was more than I could stand by and watch.
He had not turned many sods when he paused to wipe his forehead, and I
seized the spade.

"If one of us is going to do this job," I cried, "it shan't be the one
who's unfit for it. You can take the responsibility, if you like, but
that's all you do between now and two o'clock!"

I should date our actual friendship from that moment. There was some
boyish bluster on his part, and on mine a dour display which he
eventually countenanced on my promising to stay to lunch. Already the
sweat was teeming off my face, but my ankles were buried in rich brown
mould. A few days before there had been a thunderstorm accompanied by
tropical rain, which had left the earth so moist underneath that one's
muscles were not taxed as much as one's skin. And I was really very glad
of the exercise, after the physical stagnation of office life.

Not that Delavoye left everything to me; he shifted the Dutch chairs and
the umbrella tent so as to screen my operations alike from the backyard
behind us and from the windows of the occupied house next do