“Who is it? Why is he coming here?” Julia demanded half-indignantly under her breath.
“The same old man I met, but so much older!” whispered Hastings, unexpectedly puzzled whether to welcome or dread this intrusion.
“I have searched the streets through for him ever since,” she remonstrated; “I have asked everybody I saw, and no one in the whole place could tell me of any old man answering his description.”
They watched his slow, difficult approach over the gravel. He came forward without making the slightest recognition of their presence. Stopping full in front of them, he took off his hat, applied a straggling red handkerchief uncertainly to his face, and stared up at the house-front.
“They tell me,” he muttered, not once looking at either of his interlocutors, “that yer’ve been and sold it. So yer couldn’t stand it, eh, after all? It’s what Al Makepeace said ’u’d be the case. Looks innocent, though, as herself did, now, don’t it?”
“We’ve sold it,” Julia protested, “only because—because we can’t stay here. Jack—Mr. Hastings—and I are going to be married. We are going to live in Europe. My father and mother didn’t want—”
“Yer can’t make a new dog out of an old dog, ner learn an old dog new tricks,” he went on disregardingly; “and I guess it’s the same fur’s houses be concerned.”
“Who are you, anyway?” Hastings asked, getting up to offer the old man a chair.
“Who am I?” the old man echoed, suddenly attentive. “Dear me, dear me! Whose father was it as planted—and I had his own word fer it—all these ’ere tam’rack trees, and dug the well by the south door? And seen the lady of the house herself, mind yer, go out ’tween them stone posts fer the last time—and darker than pitch it was, too—on her way that night she went to meet Henry—”
At this point the old man was seized by a fit of coughing. When he recovered from it, he just stood there, gazing ahead of him, shaken with the palsy of years, so that he failed to heed the questions they thrice repeated to him.