“I should say not,” I responded. “I, too, am a stranger.”
“Ah, you, too? What a pity!”
“Yes, am I not correct in believing that you—”
“Quite so, sir; my name, sir, is Septimus MacWilloughby, and I was taught not far from Birmingham. And now, sir, will you kindly tell me what you have been doing here?”
“Been doing? Doing? Why, nothing, in the sense you seem to mean. And have you any business with me? Isn’t it rather—?”
“It is necessary.”
“I lost my way in fog up there on the hilltops and came down into the Vale in the hope of finding some sort of shelter. I was just passing by this—”
“Yes, of course,” said Mr. MacWilloughby, in what seemed to me a rather meditative tone. “Tell me, please: in your travelling to-day have you run across a very small grey spaniel, with ink-spots?”
I was reduced to repeating, “With ink-spots?”
“Yes, certainly: I repeat, a small grey spaniel, with ink-spots. The dog was not to blame if the bottle was too near the edge of the table. No, I see that you have not. Well then, by chance you may have seen a pair of Scandinavian ponies, both lame in the off foreleg?”