“I can’t make it out,” said Mr. Dick, shaking his head. “There’s something wrong, somewhere. However, it was very soon after the mistake was made of putting some of the trouble out of King Charles’s head into my head, that the man first came. I was walking out with Miss Trotwood after tea, just at dark, and there he was, close to our house.”
“Walking about?” I inquired.
“Walking about?” repeated Mr. Dick. “Let me see. I must recollect a bit. N—no, no; he was not walking about.”
I asked, as the shortest way to get at it, what he was doing.
“Well, he wasn’t there at all,” said Mr. Dick, “until he came up behind her, and whispered. Then she turned round and fainted, and I stood still and looked at him, and he walked away; but that he should have been hiding ever since (in the ground or somewhere), is the most extraordinary thing!”
“Has he been hiding ever since?” I asked.
“To be sure he has,” retorted Mr. Dick, nodding his head gravely. “Never came out, till last night! We were walking last night, and he came up behind her again, and I knew him again.”
“And did he frighten my aunt again?”
“All of a shiver,” said Mr. Dick, counterfeiting that affection and making his teeth chatter. “Held by the palings. Cried. But Trotwood, come here,” getting me close to him, that he might whisper very softly; “why did she give him money, boy, in the moonlight?”
“He was a beggar, perhaps.”