The stranger passed from one thing to another, admiring the panelling and discanting thereon. Then he said:
“I should like to take another view of the house from outside, Mr Mervyn. It’s marvellously picturesque as seen from the road, and now I’ve seen the interior I shall be able to read new beauties into it.”
“Certainly,” assented Mervyn, beginning to think the speaker was a little over enthusiastic, or a little cracked—only he didn’t look the last. “We’ll go up to the road. The path you came down is the shortest.”
They went up, Mervyn contriving that the other should lead. When they gained the sluice, Varne stood expatiating afresh, on gables and old chimney stacks. His host was more bored than ever, and was wishing to this and to that he would straightway take himself off as he had come. Would he?
“That’s a curious old door I noticed in the corner of your room, Mr Mervyn,” he said, when he had exhausted his instructive technicalities, which Mervyn had defined to himself as a damned boring prosy lecture. “If I might venture to trespass upon your kindness for a minute or two further I should so greatly like to examine it. The fact is,” he went on, “I’m quite a stranger in these parts, I found a homely little pub quite by the merest chance, The Woodcock, at Upper Gidding, homely but clean—you know it, I dare say—and I concluded to rest there for a day or two, and look around this lovely bit of country. I’ve got a bicycle with me, but I walked over here to-day.”
“Oh,” groaned Mervyn to himself. “That means I shall have to ask the fool to stay lunch, I suppose.”
“The fool” had turned, and was looking up the pond.
“Is this—excuse me, Mr Mervyn, it must be. Is this the place they were telling me about where an unknown man was bravely rescued from drowning under the ice in the middle of the night, by—by, I am sure, yourself?” And he turned to his host with a pleasant suggestion of admiration in his eyes.
“This is the place you mean, Mr—Varne. But I don’t know there’s anything particularly ‘brave’ in shoving out a ladder for the other fool to claw hold of.”
He spoke shortly—almost rudely. This he recognised in time.