The pleasant old face broke into a smile. "I am En-glish," he said, with a quaint soft intonation, and as one who speaks a foreign tongue, and beamed genially on his young compatriot.
"That's all right then. Do you know you're very like Count Tolstoi?"
"I haf been told so, but I do not know him. What is it you would like, if you please to tell me?"
"I want a sitting-room and a bedroom for a month or so, perhaps more,—not at an hotel. I want to be quiet and all to myself."
"Ah—you don' want an hotel. You want to be quiet," and he nodded understandingly. "But the hotels is quiet joost now—"
"I'd sooner have rooms in a cottage if I can get them."
Count Tolstoi turned to the fisherman to whom he had been speaking, and discussed the matter at length with him in the patois.
Then, to Graeme, "If you please to go with him. His wife has roomss to let. You will be quite comfortable there."
Graeme thanked him, and as soon as he had settled satisfactorily with his boatmen, his new keeper picked up both his bags, and led him along a stony way past the post-office, to a creeper-covered cottage, which turned a cold shoulder to the road and looked coyly into a little courtyard paved with cobble-stones and secluded from the outer world by a granite wall three feet high.
And as they went, the young man asked his silent guide somewhat doubtfully, "And do you speak English?"