He scraped the point of a boot on the cobble-stones for awhile, gazing downwards almost as if he expected to unearth something; suddenly he raised his eyes and gave me a franker look than I had so far had from him.
"Master," he said, in a low voice, and with a side glance at the open door of the inn, "I'll tell you a bit more than I've said before—you're a gentleman, I can see, and such keeps counsel. I've an object—and a particular object!—in finding them graves. That's why I've travelled all this way—as you might say, from one end of England to the other. And now, arriving where they ought to be, I find—another man after what I'm after! Another man!"
"Have you any idea who he may be?" I asked.
He hesitated—and then suddenly shook his head.
"I haven't!" he answered. "No, I haven't, and that's a fact. For a minute or two, in there, I thought that maybe I did know, or, at any rate, had a notion; but it's a fact, I haven't. All the same, I'm going Denwick way, to see if I can come across whoever it is, or get news of him. Is that your road, master?"
"No," I replied. "I'm going some way farther along the headlands. Well—I hope you'll be successful in your search for the family gravestones."
He nodded, very seriously.
"I'm not going out o' this country till I've found 'em!" he asserted determinedly. "It's what I've come three hundred miles for. Good-day, master."
He turned off by the track that led over the top of the headlands, and as long as I watched him went steadily forward without even looking back, or to the right or left of him. And presently I, too, went on my way, and rounding another corner of the cliff left the lonely inn behind me.