"Stay, Fred; I must look after my friends." He turned to them and spoke in Armenian. "Kaspar, take care of your sister; I will look after Artin."
Fred wondered who these people could be, but was too courteous not to offer his services. He thought the dark-eyed girl remarkably pretty, but felt provoked at the boy's passivity and want of interest in everything, until Jack whispered, "He is blind."
A few words in the strange tongue were exchanged with them; then Jack enquired, "Do you know about the trains to Manchester, Fred? Can my friends get there to-night?"
"Oh, I dare say. I will find out. But come on shore now. I have ordered breakfast at the Hotel; and," he added, in the warmth of his heart, "will you ask your friends to come with us?"
"You can ask them yourself," said Jack, smiling. "They speak English,—Kaspar very well, the others a little." Then he duly introduced his friend Baron Kaspar Hohanian to his cousin the Rev. Frederick Pangbourne.
A couple of hours later, the three Armenians were safely deposited in the train for London, with full instructions how to change, when they got there, to the Northern Line, while Jack and his cousin were rolling swiftly in a different direction. Conversation, as usual in such cases, was intermittent, incoherent, dealing with trifles near at hand, rather than with the great things each had to tell the other. "Those Armenians astonish me," Fred remarked. "Their manners are perfect. They might take their places, with credit, in any London drawing-room. But then, I suppose, they are of the highest rank in their own country. You called the young man 'Baron.'"
"Oh, that is nothing! Baron only means 'Mr.' But I really think, Fred, from what I heard on board, that the English fancy the Armenians are a kind of savages. They are a highly refined and intellectual race, with a civilization older than our own, and a very copious and interesting literature."
"But what a wreck your friend looks! Has he just come out of a great illness?"
"He has come out of what is infinitely worse—a Turkish prison. But, Fred, there are a thousand things I want to know. My poor uncle?"
Frederick Pangbourne told him in many words what may here be compressed into very few. When the tidings of the death of the two Graysons came to their friends at home, Ralph Pangbourne was just dead, and his eldest son was lying dangerously ill in typhoid fever. Young and experienced, and beset by many cares and troubles, the new squire, on his recovery, was quite unable to investigate the story sent to him by the Consul from Aleppo. Indeed, no one thought of doubting it; though all sincerely regretted these near relatives, left to lie in unknown graves in that distant land—