She flashed her lantern towards the spot, and in its circle of light they saw a Guy Fawkes-looking man in a black cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, walking down the path beside Puck. They ran to meet him, and the man said something to them about rooms in their head. After a time they understood he was warning them not to catch colds.
‘You’ve a bit of a cold yourself, haven’t you?’ said Una, for he ended all his sentences with a consequential cough. Puck laughed.
‘Child,’ the man answered, ‘if it hath pleased Heaven to afflict me with an infirmity——’
‘Nay, nay,’ Puck struck in, ‘the maid spoke out of kindness. I know that half your cough is but a catch to trick the vulgar; and that’s a pity. There’s honesty enough in you, Nick, without rasping and hawking.’
‘Good people’—the man shrugged his lean shoulders—’the vulgar crowd love not truth unadorned. Wherefore we philosophers must needs dress her to catch their eye or—ahem!—their ear.’
‘And what d’you think of that?’ said Puck solemnly to Dan.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘It sounds like lessons.’
‘Ah—well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper to take lessons from. Now, where can we sit that’s not indoors?’
‘In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,’ Dan suggested. ‘He doesn’t mind.’
‘Eh?’ Mr. Culpeper was stooping over the pale hellebore blooms by the light of Una’s lamp. ‘Does Master Middenboro need my poor services, then?’