A few late visitors of this sort were in the little bar when Clifford and Otto entered. But there was no sign of Jordan. Both the young men looked with curiosity at the woman who was serving behind the bar, a portly young woman with a ready tongue, who in her sturdy build and large coarse hands, as well as in the weather-beaten look of her complexion, betrayed that she was accustomed to fill up her time, when work was slack inside the house, with out-door labor of the roughest kind.
When the two friends came out, they looked at each other in disgust.
“She isn’t even young!” cried Otto. “Nearer thirty-five than twenty-five, I’ll swear!”
“And her voice! And her detestable Kentish accent!” added Clifford. “And those high cheek-bones, and that short nose! It’s a type I loathe—the type of the common shrew.”
“I shouldn’t have thought it of Jordan!” murmured Otto, in pity tempered with indignation.
“But where is the ruffian himself?” asked Clifford, stopping short. “Do you think we are on a wrong scent, after all?”
“If it were anybody but Jordan, I should say yes,” said Otto, deliberately. “But his susceptibility is so colossal that I see no reason to doubt even this.”
Nevertheless he followed Clifford, when the latter turned back toward the little bridge.
“There’s a cottage,” said the more humane King, “a little cottage by the roadside. Let us see if we can discern a petticoat in the neighborhood of that. We may be doing the poor chap an injustice, after all.”
But before they reached the cottage the attention of the two young men was arrested by the sound of a girl’s voice on the left, just before they reached the bridge. It was a voice so bright, so sweet, with such a suggestion of bubbling laughter in its tones, that they both stopped short and looked at each other with faces full of remorse.