Atherton put a question.
‘What did he look like,—this old gent of yours?’
‘Well, that I shouldn’t hardly like to say. It wasn’t much of his face I could see, only his face and his eyes,—and they wasn’t pretty. He kept a thing over his head all the time, as if he didn’t want too much to be seen.’
‘What sort of a thing?’
‘Why,—one of them cloak sort of things, like them Arab blokes used to wear what used to be at Earl’s Court Exhibition,—you know!’
This piece of information seemed to interest my companions more than anything he had said before.
‘A burnoose do you mean?’
‘How am I to know what the thing’s called? I ain’t up in foreign languages,—’tain’t likely! All I know that them Arab blokes what was at Earl’s Court used to walk about in them all over the place,—sometimes they wore them over their heads, and sometimes they didn’t. In fact if you’d asked me, instead of trying to make out as I sees double, or things what was only inside my own noddle, or something or other, I should have said this here old gent what I’ve been telling you about was a Arab bloke,—when he gets off his knees to sneak away from the window, I could see that he had his cloak thing, what was over his head, wrapped all round him.’
Mr Lessingham turned to me, all quivering with excitement.
‘I believe that what he says is true!’