thought. And, having noticed the drooping of his eyelids,
over-weighted with lashes, she brought her hand-mirror into play
again. "He is lucky," she added, "to have inherited those lazy eyes
from me."

Soon Archie retired in the direction of the kitchen-garden. The
kitchen-garden, with its opportunities of occasional refreshment
such as would not add uncomfortably to his present feeling of
tightness, was the place for a roam. Five minutes later he was
leaning against the wire-netting of the chicken-run, and offering an
old cock, who asked most pointedly for bread, a stone. To know how
to spend a morning was no easier on a birthday than on any ordinary
day.

Suddenly, however, he overheard the gardener mentioning a murder
which had been committed on Wimbledon Common, a fine tract of wild
jungle and rolling prairie, that lay across the main road. Without
waiting to prosecute inquiries which would have told him that,
although the confession was only in the morning papers, the murder
was twenty years old, he escaped unseen and set his little white
figure on a walk through the common. He was out to see the blood.

But, for a birthday, it was a disappointing morning. He discovered
for the first time that Wimbledon Common occupied an interminable
expanse of country; and really there was nothing unusual this
morning about its appearance, or about the looks of the people whom
he passed. So he gave up his quest and returned homeward. Then it
was that his lazy eyes looked down a narrow, leafy lane that ran
along the high wall of his own garden. Now all Wimbledon suspects
that this lane was designed by the Corporation as a walk for lovers.