end the journalist could not possibly start till the next day,
and he liked his friend the journalist, and had looked forward to a
few days on the river. He did not particularly like or dislike the
Prime Minister, but he intensely disliked the alternative of a few
hours in the train. Nevertheless, he accepted Prime Ministers as he
accepted railway trains--as part of a system which he, at least, was
not the revolutionist sent on earth to destroy. So he telephoned to
March, asking him, with many apologetic curses and faint damns, to
take the boat down the river as arranged, that they might meet at
Willowood by the time settled; then he went outside and hailed a
taxicab to take him to the railway station. There he paused at the
bookstall to add to his light luggage a number of cheap murder
stories, which he read with great pleasure, and without any
premonition that he was about to walk into as strange a story in
real life.

A little before sunset he arrived, with his light suitcase in hand,
before the gate of the long riverside gardens of Willowood Place,
one of the smaller seats of Sir Isaac Hook, the master of much
shipping and many newspapers. He entered by the gate giving on the
road, at the opposite side to the river, but there was a mixed
quality in all that watery landscape which perpetually reminded a
traveler that the river was near. White gleams of water would shine
suddenly like swords or spears in the green thickets. And even in
the garden itself, divided into courts and curtained with hedges and
high garden trees, there hung everywhere in the air the music of
water. The first of the green courts which he entered appeared to be
a somewhat neglected croquet lawn, in which was a solitary young man
playing croquet against himself. Yet he was not an enthusiast for
the game, or even for the garden; and his sallow but well-featured
face looked rather sullen than otherwise. He was only one of those
young men who cannot support the burden of consciousness unless they
are doing something, and whose conceptions of doing something are
limited to a game of some kind. He was dark and well dressed in a
light holiday fashion, and Fisher recognized him at once as a young
man named James Bullen, called, for some unknown reason, Bunker. He
was the nephew of Sir Isaac; but, what was much more important at
the moment, he was also the private secretary of the Prime Minister.

"Hullo, Bunker!" observed Horne Fisher. "You're the s