“I see. You are an absentee landlord. Fie, sir! We hold you responsible thereby for many a pretty ghost tale.”
He answered jocosely; but he was looking at the other with a certain ruminative wonder.
“Twenty years,” he murmured. “Why, then, your father must have stepped straight into old Turk’s shoes.”
“The former tenant? Was that his name?”
“Turk—yes.”
He was still engulfed in retrospect. His eyes were fixed, unwinking, like a doll’s.
“Well,” he said at last—sucking at the stem of his “church-warden” as if he were a baby ravenous for its “comforter”—“it fair upsets me, it does.”
“What does?”
“How you can ’a let a fruitful estate like that go to wrack and ruin for twenty years.”
Mr. Tuke was silent. Had he spoken, and the truth, he could only have echoed the other’s wonder. As it was, his mouth was tied to an adequate explanation.