‘Some chance stranger,’ answered Brion.
‘Yes,’ she responded, but without conviction, and sat quiet a little while, looking in his face and abstractedly stroking his sleeve. ‘Brion,’ she said suddenly, ‘what is a bustard?’
‘Why, a bird,’ answered the boy, somewhat surprised.
‘O!’ she said. ‘But I don’t see—quite—you can’t be a bird.’
‘I!’
‘Sir John—I heard him once—called you the Bagott bustard.’
‘Called me?’ he exclaimed, confounded. ‘Why should he speak of me at all? He does not know me, nor I him.’
‘O! he knows about you—and about your Uncle, too. I tell you all the people on the moors know about one another.’
‘Well, what have they—what has Sir John to say against my Uncle?’
‘Why against, Brion? That was not my word.’