The views were so beautiful and Mr. Gaythorne's descriptions so interesting, that, as usual, the time passed quickly. It was not until they were drinking their coffee in the pleasant firelight that Olivia found an opportunity of narrating her husband's strange adventure of the previous evening.
Mr. Gaythorne listened with his usual air of half contemptuous amusement; but before she came to the end of the recital he turned upon her quickly.
"Do you mean that the tramp is actually in your house at this moment?" he asked, indignantly.
"Oh, please don't call him that; he is a gentleman, he speaks in quite an educated manner, and his ways are so refined. Marcus saw that at once."
"Pooh, nonsense! My dear Mrs. Luttrell, a gentlemanly tramp is the worst kind; it is generally drink and profligacy that have dragged them down. You will be robbed or burnt in your beds!"
Olivia could not conceal her amusement. A vivid remembrance of the flushed, weary young face of the wanderer rose before her; it was so boyish-looking with the fair hair and golden brown moustache.
"I am sure he does not drink," she returned, trying vainly to suppress a smile; but this contradiction did not please Mr. Gaythorne.
"How can you know anything about it?" he asked, testily; "from your own account he has told you nothing except that he has been in a hospital and a casual ward—they have plenty of cases of delirium tremens in both places. Good heavens! and I thought Dr. Luttrell was a sensible man. This is the way he takes care of his wife and child, harbouring a frozen-out tramp."
"Dear Mr. Gaythorne," returned Olivia, pleadingly, "just put yourself in my husband's place. Marcus found the poor young fellow on a doorstep in Harbut Road not a dozen yards from his own door. Being a doctor, he saw at once that he must be warmed and fed or life would be endangered, and Christmas night of all nights. How could he forbear in sheer humanity to take in the poor creature, and then when he found how weak he was, how was he to turn him out into the streets again?"
"He might have sent for a cab and had him driven to a hospital."