There followed a pause. Then a diffident voice with an unmistakably foreign accent made reply.
"Were you speaking to me?"
Glancing up in the direction of the voice, Hilary discovered a stranger seated against the trunk of a willow on the high bank above her. She started and coloured. She had forgotten Dick's wild man. She described him later as the brownest man she had ever seen. His face was brown, the lower part of it covered with a thick growth of brown beard. His eyes were brown, surmounted by very bushy eyebrows. His hair was brown. His hands were brown. His clothes were brown, and he was smoking what looked like a brown clay pipe.
Hilary regained her self-possession almost at once. The diffidence of the voice gave her assurance.
"I thought my cousin was there," she explained. "You are Dick's friend, I think?"
The man on the bank smiled an affirmative, and Hilary remarked to herself that he had splendid teeth.
"I am Dick's friend," he said, speaking slowly, as if learning the lesson from her. There was a slight subdued twang in his utterance which attracted Hilary immensely.
She nodded encouragingly to him.
"I am Dick's cousin," she said. "He will tell you all about me if you ask him."
"I will certainly ask," the stranger said in his soft, foreign drawl.