The clear and colourless eyes looked at her quite steadily.
“Perhaps,” said Lord Ivywood.
Dorian Wimpole made a sudden movement a few yards off, where he was looking at a picture, and said, “Hullo! What’s this?” Mr. Hibbs was literally gaping in the direction of the entrance.
Framed in that fine Byzantine archway stood a great big, boney man in threadbare but careful clothes, with a harsh, high-featured, intelligent face, to which a dark beard under the chin gave something of the Puritanic cast. Somehow his whole personality seemed to be pulled together and explained when he spoke with a North Country accent.
“Weel, lards,” he said, genially, “t’hoose be main great on t’pictures. But I coom for suthin’ in a moog. Haw! Haw!”
Leveson and Hibbs looked at each other. Then Leveson rushed from the room. Lord Ivywood did not move a finger; but Mr. Wimpole, with a sort of poetic curiosity, drew nearer to the stranger, and studied him.
“It’s perfectly awful,” cried Enid Wimpole, in a loud whisper, “the man must be drunk.”
“Na, lass,” said the man with gallantry, “a’ve not been droonk, nobbut at Hurley Fair, these years and all; a’m a decent lad and workin’ ma way back t’Wharfdale. No harm in a moog of ale, lass.”
“Are you quite sure,” asked Dorian Wimpole, with a singular sort of delicate curiosity, “are you quite sure you’re not drunk.”
“A’m not droonk,” said the man, jovially.