The Notched Hairpin Read Online Free Page A

them today,” I again showed perfect cooperation.
    As a result we were off in the train within an hour. For when Mr. M. chooses to act, he can do so with a speed and precision I can often envy. When we were comfortably seated and had half an hour before lunch would be served, he took from his bag a Milton and handed me a nice little edition of Housman’s Poems.
    â€œWe are going into country which these two poets illustrated. So, while I read ‘Comus’ and, being so much the elder, brood on the dreaming water of Sabrina fair , you, being of his age, can climb Tredon Hill’ with the Shropshire Lad ,
    â€˜And hear the larks so high
    About us in the sky.’”
    It was perhaps forty minutes after lunch—the right time for digestion to have reached that stage when it suggests mild exercise—that Mr. M. rose and, taking down his suitcase, said, “We shall be met at the station by a house investigator.”
    â€œInvestigator?” I questioningly exclaimed. “Why go so far to avoid the obvious and not call him in common parlance an agent?”
    He smiled at my rally and replied in equally good vein, “Don’t you think that ‘agent’ sounds a little secretive, anyhow too committal, almost perhaps sinister? While ‘investigator,’ after all, commits us to nothing? We need not take the house if in any way you should feel that it might not suit you.”
    This was graciousness itself, and I hastened to assure him that all I had been told made me very much inclined to close the negotiations without further trouble.
    â€œWell,” he said as the train began to slow, “anyhow, we shall have seen an interesting piece, as museum authorities call anything that is more of the past than the present.”
    At the station a quiet-looking man came up to Mr. M. As only two obvious farmers and three ladies of uncertain age got off the train with us, the man did not have to use much acumen to recognize us. He ushered us out to where a delightful museum piece of a landau was waiting for us—all complete, with faded, moth-eaten cushions once royal-blue, and old stamped and tasseled leather window straps for hauling up the glass windowpanes when the cracked leather-japanned top hamper should be put up against the rain.
    But today was glorious and, imagining myself the Grand Duke of Baden driving to take “the cure” with my equerry and physician, I thoroughly enjoyed it as we bowled along through the streets of the quaint little town. Mr. Mycroft, unconsciously playing up to the role of court physician in which I had cast him, entertained me, the Royal Highness, with, “Twibury is a delightful little town. It has a medicinal warm spring. On your left you see the tower of the largely Saxon church, with the characteristic ‘long-and-short’ work of the quoins and the ‘midwall shafting’ of the tower windows, while round the town itself are some peculiarly happy examples of mid-eighteenth-century domestic architecture.”
    All this, which would have bored me had I been listening to it “out of character,” now that I was daydreaming of being a German princelet fell in so well with the whole fancy that I was already more than half in love with the place.
    When, then, through orchards in bloom, we drew up by a fine, stately brick house with a flight of mellow stone steps leading up to the fanlighted and column-flanked door, I did not need to decipher, in the finely wreathed ironwork which arched over the steps and made a nest for the doorlamp to rest, the date “1760.”
    I turned to Mr. M. as we came to a standstill and said, “I’m won already. We may stay here as long as you please.”
    I should have judged that he would then fail me, and his “Well, wait,” I felt, was meant to bring me down from a dream which, like enough, he saw I was enjoying. Certainly there seemed less and less to wait for, or to