The stranger still stood looking down at him fixedly.
“Is your name James Christopher Hibbault?”
Without warning, without time for the canny little morsel of humanity to weigh the wisdom of an answer, the question was shot at him and he was left gasping and speechless after an incriminating “Yes,” forced from him by the suddenness of the onslaught, and the truth-compelling power of those keen eyes. “Least it’s Hibbault,” he added unwillingly. “Jim, they calls me.”
“I think it is Christopher as well, and I prefer Christopher. And what are you doing on the Great Road at this hour in the afternoon, Christopher?”
And Jim—or Christopher,—trained and renowned for a useful evasiveness of retort in those far-off London days, answered mechanically: “Waiting for the fortune to come true.”
Then the hot blood rushed to his face from sheer shame at his own betrayal of the darling secret of his small existence.
“Your fortune?” echoed the other slowly. “Fortunes do not come for waiting. What do you mean?”
“It was the old woman said so—mother didn’t believe it. She said as how my fortune would come to me on the Great Road. There wer’n’t no Great Road there, so when I heard as how they called this the Great Road, I just stuck to it.”
It was a long speech. The boy had none of the 7 half-stupid stolidity of the country-bred, and yet lacked something of the garrulity of the cute street lad. His voice too was a surprise. The broad vowels seemed acquired and uncertain and jarred on the hearer with a sense of misfit.
“Do you live at Whitmansworth Union?”