Why did mr Nuttel move to countryside

Sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in

through that window - "

She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton when the aunt bustled into the room

with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her appearance.

"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.

"She has been very interesting," said Framton.

"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; "my husband and brothers

will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in this way. They've been out for snipe

in the marshes to-day, so they'll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you men-folk, isn't

it?"

She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the prospects for duck

in the winter. To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but only partially

successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his hostess was

giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the

open window and the lawn beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have

paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.

"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance

of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise," announced Framton, who laboured under the

tolerably wide-spread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least

detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so

much in agreement," he continued.

"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she

suddenly brightened into alert attention - but not to what Framton was saying.

"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't they look as if they were muddy

up to the eyes!"

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey

sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open window with dazed horror

in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the

same direction.

In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they

all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung

over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the

house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "I said, Bertie, why do you bound?"

Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall-door, the gravel-drive, and the front gate

were dimly-noted stages in his headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the

hedge to avoid an imminent collision.

"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window;

"fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up?"

"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton; "could only talk about his

illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you arrived. One would

think he had seen a ghost."

"I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece calmly; "he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was

once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and

had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming

just above him. Enough to make anyone their nerve."

Romance at short notice was her speciality.