He paused outside the inn in the middle of the road, hesitating. I think I gathered what was in his mind. He was trying to decide whether he should go straight home to his sister, who was probably waiting for him, or stay and drink more beer than he would have cared for her to know of. Already the rose of his youth was coarsening slightly through the habit he had inherited from his father.
He came to the opposite seat and sat down. He was the incarnation of the born lounger. There was a careless ease in his carriage, and a just perceptible touch of exaggerated fashion in his clothes, which betrayed a pleasure in personal appearance, something beyond that merely incidental to youth.
At first he barely noticed my presence on the other seat, mistaking me in the gloom—for I was sitting in the shadow of the house—for some village yokel having his fill before going on his way home to a scolding wife. Gradually, however, it dawned upon him that the occupant of the other bench was not one of the stray labourers who patronised the place. As for myself, I was wondering whether I should retire before he entered into conversation with me, or run the risk, and see if matters turned out to my advantage.
“Quiet place, this,” he said, tentatively.
“I’m glad to say it is,” I answered, lazily.
Always answer lazily when a well-bred Englishman addresses you for the first time. It impresses him.
Young Gascoyne gathered from my voice that he was presumably talking to an equal. He became friendly.
“I suppose you mean,” he said, laughing, “that you came here for quiet, and that you mean to get it.”
“No, I don’t quite mean that. So long as I can sleep where it is quiet, I don’t care very much about absolute silence.”
“Then I may talk to you? The evenings are so beastly dull down here.” I made a very shrewd guess at the way he had been spending the earlier part of that evening. The possibility of six brothers to fight must have been exciting enough, but then Harry Gascoyne belonged to the class that wants amusing all the time.