Otis approached with the easy confidence and winning smile that he could assume at will. He begged pardon for troubling, but he had unthinkingly mixed himself up in what looked to him like a local scandal of formidable dimensions, and he had come to the vicar for advice. Mr. Cooper's anger was not altogether proof against the insidious appeal. He was used to being ignored and left out of things, and, to one whose own idea of his own importance, both socially and parochially, was enormous, the way this man approached him was a salve to a wound always more or less smarting.
After a short parley, understanding that Otis had material facts to communicate, he invited him in.
Mrs. Cooper and her daughters were at tea; and there was a flutter of consternation among them for they had seen the exit of Otis from the Fransdale sports. Mrs. Cooper became unspeakably coy, blushing like a girl, and dismissing her brood, with their tea half done, on the flimsiest of pretexts.
"This is not surprisin', Mrs. Cooper," said Otis sadly. "I was a stranger up there, and nobody knew me. It was my word against that of a bad and dangerous man, who is sailin' among you all under false colours. These young ladies heard him givin' me the lie up there. In justice, I should like to have them hear what I want to tell you now. You may have heard Mr. Mayne or Miss Lutwyche talk of the man Mestaer?"
"Yes, yes," gasped Madeline, at the door. "She had one letter from him after she got here—you remember, mother, the letter she would not show you. She said he wanted to marry her!"
"She wouldn't show you his letter?" slowly said Otis, standing by the table, and turning his hat round in his hand as if on the point of taking leave. "Has she ever told you that he goes now under the name of Brooke?"
"What's that you say?" sharply asked the vicar.
"He's well disguised," replied Otis. "He bluffed me, I own it. But Arnie here, he knew him from the first; didn't you, boy?"
Arnold looked at the three tall, full-blown girls, blushed admiringly and assented.
Surprise deprived them all of speech.