But the shivering man was beginning to feel that dry clothes and a fire outweighed everything else in his mind.
“Let me get inside,” stammered he, “and when I’m dry again, I’ll talk to you.”
But this speech caused Claris to look at him with more attention, and he then perceived that Lowndes was dressed.
“There’s something to be explained here!” he exclaimed, with sudden suspicion. “You haven’t been to bed. Who are you?” he asked, in a different tone, barring the entrance to the house with his burly person. “Who are you? And what did you come here for? Now, out with it! Were you sent here to lay traps for honest folks? Speak out, man, or back you shall go into the river again!”
And Claris seized the unfortunate Lowndes in his powerful grasp, and forced him a couple of steps backward in the direction of the little river.
By this time Nell had partly recovered her composure. She now spoke to her uncle in a calmer voice.
“Let him come in, Uncle George,” she said. “Let him come in and change his wet clothes. And then make him give an account of himself, if he can.”
With apparent reluctance the innkeeper took his niece’s advice, led Lowndes up to his room as if he had been a prisoner, locked him in, and kept watch outside the door until he was ready.
Jack Lowndes could hear the uncle and niece in whispered conversation on the landing, and murmured some imprecations against the “artful little hussy,” as he detected by the rising anger in George Claris’s tones the fact that the girl was “working him up.”
A thundering knock at his door, which threatened to bring it down as easily as Lowndes himself had brought down the door of the upstairs room, warned him that it was time for him to come out and face the indignant pair.