He measured me for a moment with his eye before he said, “Mr. Frank isn’t the fighting sort.  I’ve seen him go white before now, when I’ve took the corner a bit sharp.”  He paused a moment before adding, “But they’re all a bit like that.”

“Nervous at dangerous corners,” I commented, sharpening his image for him.

“Blue with funk,” he said.

It occurred to me that possibly some hint of the family taint in Brenda had influenced, at the last moment, the plan of her proposed elopement; but I said nothing of that to Banks.

“I’d better leave my things,” I said, returning to the subject which was of chief importance to me.  You take me to that inn at Hurley.  If I arrive in a motor, they’ll take me in all right, even though I haven’t any luggage.  I’ll invent some story as we go.”

“They’d take you in,” Banks replied thoughtfully. “’Tisn’t hardly more than a public house, really.”

I thought that some strain of the gentleman’s servant in him was concerned with the question of the entertainment proper to my station.

“It’s only for one night,” I remarked.

“Oh! yes,” he said, obviously thinking of something else.

“Too far for you to go?” I asked.

He glanced at his wrist watch.  “Quarter past five,” he said.  “It’d take me the best part of two hours to get there and back—­the road’s none too good.”

“You don’t want to go?” I said.

“Well, no, honestly I don’t,” he replied.  “The fact is I want to see Mr. Jervaise again.”  He smiled as he added, “My little affair isn’t settled yet by a good bit, you see.”

I sheered away from that topic; chiefly, I think, because I wanted to avoid any suggestion of pumping him.  When you have recently been branded as a spy, you go about for the next few days trying not to feel like one.

“Isn’t there any place in the village I could go to?” I asked.

He shook his head.  “There’s one pub—­a sort of beerhouse—­but they don’t take people in,” he said.

“No lodgings?” I persisted.

“The Jervaises don’t encourage that sort of thing,” he replied.  “Afraid of the place getting frippery.  I’ve heard them talking about it in the car.  And as they own every blessed cottage in the place....”  He left the deduction to my imagination, and continued with the least touch of bashfulness, “You wouldn’t care to come to us, I suppose?”

“To the Home Farm?” I replied stupidly.  I was absurdly embarrassed.  If I had not chanced to see that grouping in the wood before lunch, I should have jumped at the offer.  But I knew that it must have been Miss Banks who had seen me—­spying.  Jervaise had had his back to me.  And she would probably, I thought, take his view of the confounded accident.  She would be as anxious to avoid me as I was to avoid her.  Coming so unexpectedly, this invitation to the Farm appeared to me as a perfectly impossible suggestion.