"Only a little," I replied in English. "All I know is that this---- By the way, hadn't you better ask his name and address?"
"My name," he said wretchedly, "is Lamb--John Lamb. I'm head clerk at Phipps Brothers, the timber-merchants, Amelia Road, Shepherd's Bush. You'll have heard of Phipps Brothers?" he added imploringly.
"All I know of Mr. John Lamb," I went on, "is this. He stared at us all the way from Newhaven. He spied about, reading the names on our labels. He pushed himself on us at the Customs. He followed us to the Cheval d'Or, and practically drove us out of the rooms we had taken. He has dogged us through half the streets in Dieppe this morning. Lastly, he has given us the honour of his company at lunch."
The manager was about to work up, for my benefit, a polite adequacy of fiery indignation. But Mr. John Lamb forestalled him. Plucking up courage, he retorted impudently:
"Well, and what if it's true? We aren't in England, are we? Everybody knows they're more free-and-easy in France."
The manager was loaded and primed for an explosion. But I got in another word.
"Didn't I give you a broad enough hint at the Customs?" I asked.
"Yes," he said coarsely. "You did. But what about the other young lady? Let her come out here, fair and square, and say if she didn't egg me on. 'Tisn't my fault for thinking I was in for a soft thing. You're not to blame, of course. You've snubbed me right enough all along, no error. To tell the truth, Ma'am, I thought you were sick because it was the other young lady I was struck with, and not you."
What possessed him to add this insult to injury, when he was actually in the lion's mouth, only himself knows. It wasn't courage; for he had suddenly gone paler and shakier than before. Probably he was clinging in desperation to a last mad hope that he had indeed made a conquest of "the other young lady," and that she would rush out in my wake to intercede for him, and to set him free.
As I turned round and took my first step back to the drawing-room, the manager exploded like a thousand bombs. How the Grey One managed to stand unconsumed amidst those lightnings of wrath and thunderings of menace, I can't conceive. As to his past, the Grey One learned that he was directly descended from a long line of cads, rogues, gaol-birds, and impostors; and as to his future, it appeared that the greater part of it (after he had been soundly kicked, thrashed, and horse-whipped) was to be spent in a French prison. While this fiery storm was blazing and smashing around his grey cloth cap, I neither saw Mr. John Lamb, of Phipps Brothers, nor heard him. He took it lying down.