“In one sense I'm afraid not,” admitted Shelton.
“Do you know his story? I will bet you sixpence”—and Mr. Dennant paused to swing his mallet with a proper accuracy “that he's been in prison.”
“Prison!” ejaculated Shelton.
“I think,” said Mr. Dennant, with bent knees carefully measuring his next shot, “that you ought to make inquiries—ah! missed it! Awkward these hoops! One must draw the line somewhere.”
“I never could draw,” returned Shelton, nettled and uneasy; “but I understand—I 'll give him a hint to go.”
“Don't,” said Mr. Dennant, moving after his second ball, which Shelton had smitten to the farther end, “be offended, my dear Shelton, and by no means give him a hint; he interests me very much—a very clever, quiet young fellow.”
That this was not his private view Shelton inferred by studying Mr. Dennant's manner in the presence of the vagabond. Underlying the well-bred banter of the tranquil voice, the guarded quizzicality of his pale brown face, it could be seen that Algernon Cuffe Dennant, Esq., J.P., accustomed to laugh at other people, suspected that he was being laughed at. What more natural than that he should grope about to see how this could be? A vagrant alien was making himself felt by an English Justice of the Peace—no small tribute, this, to Ferrand's personality. The latter would sit silent through a meal, and yet make his effect. He, the object of their kindness, education, patronage, inspired their fear. There was no longer any doubt; it was not of Ferrand that they were afraid, but of what they did not understand in him; of horrid subtleties meandering in the brain under that straight, wet-looking hair; of something bizarre popping from the curving lips below that thin, lopsided nose.
But to Shelton in this, as in all else, Antonia was what mattered. At first, anxious to show her lover that she trusted him, she seemed never tired of doing things for his young protege, as though she too had set her heart on his salvation; but, watching her eyes when they rested on the vagabond, Shelton was perpetually reminded of her saying on the first day of his visit to Holm Oaks, “I suppose he 's really good—I mean all these things you told me about were only....”
Curiosity never left her glance, nor did that story of his four days' starving leave her mind; a sentimental picturesqueness clung about that incident more valuable by far than this mere human being with whom she had so strangely come in contact. She watched Ferrand, and Shelton watched her. If he had been told that he was watching her, he would have denied it in good faith; but he was bound to watch her, to find out with what eyes she viewed this visitor who embodied all the rebellious under-side of life, all that was absent in herself.
“Dick,” she said to him one day, “you never talk to me of Monsieur Ferrand.”