"Not a bit of it. You've told me to go, and I'm going at once--this very
day. The police will find me at my father's for the next fortnight," said
Hutchings with a sneer. "And when I go to London I'll leave my address."

"A lot of good your going to London will do you. I'll see you never get
another place in this country," snarled Lord Loudwater.

Hutchings gave him a look of vindictive malignity so intense that it
made Mr. Manley quite uncomfortable, turned, and went out of the room.

Lord Loudwater said: "I'll teach the scoundrel to rob me! Write at once
for a new butler."

He took some lumps of sugar from a jar on the mantelpiece, and went
through the door which opened into the library.

In the library he stopped and shouted back: "If Morton comes about the
timber, I shall be in the stables."

Then he went through one of the long windows of the library into the
garden and took his way to the stables. As he drew near them the scowl
cleared from his face. But it remained a formidable face; it did not grow
pleasant. None the less, he spent a pleasant hour in the stables, petting
his horses. He was fond of horses, not of cats, and he never bullied and
seldom abused his horses as he abused and bullied his fellow men and
women. This was the result of his experience. He had learnt from it that
he might bully and abuse his human dependents with impunity. As a boy he
had also bullied and abused his horses. But in his eighteenth year he had
been savaged by a young horse he had maltreated, and the lesson had stuck
in his mind. It was a simple, obtuse mind, but it had formed the theory