The owner of the phaeton and the elderly gentleman whom he had called Stapleton exchanged no remarks, but they both cast curious, thoughtful glances at their small companion from time to time. They had to rouse him from his rhapsody to ask the way at last. He answered concisely and shortly with no touch of the local burr.
“How came you to be so far away?” demanded Jim’s fine gentleman as they were passing through the market-place.
Jim was engaged in superciliously ignoring the amazed stares of the town boys who were apt to look down on the “workhouse kid,” though he attended the Whitmansworth school. Once past them he answered the question vaguely.
“The master was out: I hadn’t to do anything.”
“And you had permission to wander where you liked?”
To this Jim did not reply. He had not permission, but he counted on the good nature of Mrs. Moss, with 9 whom he was a favourite, to plead his cause with her husband.
“Had you permission?” demanded his questioner again, bending down suddenly to look in the boy’s face with his disconcerting eyes.
It would have seemed to Jim on reflection a great deal more prudent and quite as easy to have said “yes” as “no,” but the “no” slipped out, and the questioner smiled, not ill-pleased.
At last they came to a standstill before the door of the Whitmansworth Union. Jim, with a prodigious sigh, prepared to descend. The glorious adventure was over. Also he prepared to slip away to a more lowly entrance, but was stopped by a retaining hand.
The porter, no friend of Jim’s, stared with dull amazement at the apparition of the fine turn-out, and the still finer gentleman waiting on the doorstep with that little “varmint” of a Hibbault. He signed to the boy angrily to begone, as he ushered the visitor in.