“His visit to Lefford seems to have been as flying a one as my brother’s was, and his did not last a day. How much?” to the girl behind the counter. “Sixpence? There it is.” And, with a general adieu nodded to the rest of us, the captain left the shop.
“I don’t like that dandy,” spoke Cattledon, in her severest tone. “I have said so before. I’m sure he is a man who cannot be trusted.”
I answered nothing: but I had for a little time now thought the same. There was that about him that gave you the idea he was in some way or other not true. And it may as well be mentioned here that Captain Collinson got back to Lefford that same evening, in time to make his appearance at Mrs. Parker’s soirée, at which both Miss Belmont and Mina Knox were present.
So now we come to Tod again, and to the day of his arrival. Talking of one thing and another, telling him of this and that, of the native politics, as we all like to do when a stranger comes to set himself down, however temporarily, amidst us, I mentioned the familiarity that in two of the people struck upon my memory. Never did I see this same Captain Collinson, never did I see Madame St. Vincent, or hear them speak, or listen to their laugh, but the feeling that I had met them before—had been, so to say, intimate with both one and the other—came forcibly upon me.
“And yet it would seem, upon the face of things, that I never have been,” I continued to Tod, when telling of this. “Madame St. Vincent says she never left the South of France until last year; and the captain has been nearly all his life in India.”
“You know you do take fancies, Johnny.”
“True. But, are not those fancies generally borne out by the result? Any way, they puzzle me, both of them: and there’s a ring in their voices that——”
“A ring in their voices!” put in Tod, laughing.
“Say an accent, then; especially in madame’s; and it sounds, to my ears, unmistakably Worcestershire.”
“Johnny, you are fanciful!”