Him also he hailed by name, and the man slipped to the ground and strolled forward.  It seemed fated that he should feel something of the past in the accidents of that place, for the figure might well have been an early-Victorian ghost revisiting the ghosts of the croquet hoops and mallets.  It was the figure of an elderly man with long whiskers that looked almost fantastic, and a quaint and careful cut of collar and cravat.  Having been a fashionable dandy forty years ago, he had managed to preserve the dandyism while ignoring the fashions.  A white top-hat lay beside the Morning Post in the hammock behind him.  This was the Duke of Westmoreland, the relic of a family really some centuries old; and the antiquity was not heraldry but history.  Nobody knew better than Fisher how rare such noblemen are in fact, and how numerous in fiction.  But whether the duke owed the general respect he enjoyed to the genuineness of his pedigree or to the fact that he owned a vast amount of very valuable property was a point about which Mr. Fisher’s opinion might have been more interesting to discover.

“You were looking so comfortable,” said Fisher, “that I thought you must be one of the servants.  I’m looking for somebody to take this bag of mine; I haven’t brought a man down, as I came away in a hurry.”

“Nor have I, for that matter,” replied the duke, with some pride.  “I never do.  If there’s one animal alive I loathe it’s a valet.  I learned to dress myself at an early age and was supposed to do it decently.  I may be in my second childhood, but I’ve not go so far as being dressed like a child.”

“The Prime Minister hasn’t brought a valet; he’s brought a secretary instead,” observed Fisher.  “Devilish inferior job.  Didn’t I hear that Harker was down here?”

“He’s over there on the landing stage,” replied the duke, indifferently, and resumed the study of the Morning Post.

Fisher made his way beyond the last green wall of the garden on to a sort of towing path looking on the river and a wooden island opposite.  There, indeed, he saw a lean, dark figure with a stoop almost like that of a vulture, a posture well known in the law courts as that of Sir John Harker, the Attorney-General.  His face was lined with headwork, for alone among the three idlers in the garden he was a man who had made his own way; and round his bald brow and hollow temples clung dull red hair, quite flat, like plates of copper.

“I haven’t seen my host yet,” said Horne Fisher, in a slightly more serious tone than he had used to the others, “but I suppose I shall meet him at dinner.”

“You can see him now; but you can’t meet him,” answered Harker.

He nodded his head toward one end of the island opposite, and, looking steadily in the same direction, the other guest could see the dome of a bald head and the top of a fishing rod, both equally motionless, rising out of the tall undergrowth against the background of the stream beyond.  The fisherman seemed to be seated against the stump of a tree and facing toward the other bank, so that his face could not be seen, but the shape of his head was unmistakable.