In the shadow of a white lilac-bush, Colonel Musgrave paused with an awed face.

"Good Lord!" said he, aghast at the notion; "what would Agatha say if she knew I had been fighting like a drunken truck-driver! Or, rather, what would she refrain from saying! Only, she wouldn't believe it of me. And, for the matter of that," Rudolph Musgrave continued, after a moment's reflection, "I wouldn't have believed it of myself a week ago. I think I am changing, somehow. A week ago I would have fetched in the police and sworn out a warrant; and, if the weather had been as damp as it is, I would have waited to put on my rubbers before I would have done that much."