"Sir! sir! Mr. Thorold!" she called. And then, as he checked his horse: "Is the gentleman all right? He's a furriner, and I never did hold as they could pay honest."
"What are you talking about, Mrs. Timber?" asked the young man, utterly bewildered.
"Why, of the gentleman you sent to me, sir."
"I sent no gentleman. Stay! Do you mean Captain Lestrange?"
"Yes, sir, that's his name--a nasty French name. He said you recommended my house. I'm sure I'm very much obliged, Mr. Thorold." Here Mrs. Timber dropped her best curtsy and smiled a sour smile. "But I arsk again, sir, is he good pay?"
Alan was amazed at the Captain's impudence in making him stand sponsor for his respectability.
"I don't know anything about the gentleman, Mrs. Timber," he said, giving his horse the spur. "He is a stranger to me."
"Oh, is he?" muttered the landlady to herself as Alan galloped off. "Well, he don't get nothing out of me till I sees the color of his money. The idea of giving Mr. Thorold's name when he had no right to! Ah! I doubt he's a robber of the widder and the orphan. But I'll show him!"
And Mrs. Timber, full of wrath, went into her hotel to have it out with her new lodger.
Alan rode fast and hard in the waning light, between the flowering hedgerows--rode to get away from his thoughts. The advent of Lestrange with his cut-and-dried story, with his accusation of the dead, and his claim to be Sophy's father, was ominous of evil. Alan had his own uncomfortable feelings, but of these he decided to tell no one, not even Phelps, although Phelps was his very good friend. In taking this resolution, Alan made a very serious mistake--a mistake which he found out when it was too late to remedy his injudicious silence.