It had all the necessary qualifications for a school. It was
isolated. The village was two miles from its gates. It was near
the sea. There were fields for cricket and football, and inside
the house a number of rooms of every size, suitable for classrooms
and dormitories.

The household, when I arrived, consisted, besides Mr Abney, myself,
another master named Glossop, and the matron, of twenty-four boys,
the butler, the cook, the odd-job-man, two housemaids, a scullery-maid,
and a parlour-maid. It was a little colony, cut off from the outer
world.

With the exception of Mr Abney and Glossop, a dismal man of nerves
and mannerisms, the only person with whom I exchanged speech on my
first evening was White, the butler. There are some men one likes
at sight. White was one of them. Even for a butler he was a man of
remarkably smooth manners, but he lacked that quality of austere
aloofness which I have noticed in other butlers.

He helped me unpack my box, and we chatted during the process. He
was a man of medium height, square and muscular, with something,
some quality of springiness, as it were, that seemed unusual in a
butler. From one or two things he said, I gathered that he had
travelled a good deal. Altogether he interested me. He had humour,
and the half-hour which I had spent with Glossop made me set a
premium on humour. I found that he, like myself, was a new-comer.
His predecessor had left at short notice during the holidays, and
he had secured the vacancy at about the same time that I was
securing mine. We agreed that it was a pretty place. White, I