“Not if you can help it,” said Bar, carelessly. “The family doesn’t recognize him at all, and I don’t want to.”
Bar was perfectly sure, in his own mind, that he was telling the exact truth, but it was the first mention he had made of father or family, and, while it made his heart and fingers tingle very curiously and pleasantly, it did not by any means diminish the respect with which he was regarded, for the keen-eyed official was the last man in the world to be taken in by such a face as that of Major Montague.
He had read him through and through at a glance, and had wondered what he could have to do with a quiet, self-respecting young gentleman like Barnaby Vernon.
Bar strolled away into the reading-room, muttering to himself:
“So he has hunted me up. Saw my name on the hotel register, most likely. Now, I’ll have to get away from this. He’d be sure to make trouble for me. Then he belongs to that horrid old time, and I don’t want anything to do with it. Somehow, I feel as if something were about to happen to me, and I don’t exactly know what to do with myself. Guess I’ll go on an exploring tour, but I’ll fix it so none of that set’ll know me if I come across ’em.”
No doubt there had been something of theatrical experience in Barnaby’s “old time,” for he seemed to know precisely what to do.
He walked out of the hotel in a very decent suit, of which the coat and waistcoat were dark, and the trousers light-gray, but before he had gone a block, he had bought and put on a loose linen duster.
Then at a hat-store he purchased a high black silk “stove-pipe,” to replace the straw he had been wearing.
At another shop he bought a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Then a neat mustache appeared on his upper-lip, a college society pin on his neck-tie, a little cane in his hand, and thus attired he could have passed muster anywhere as a young collegian of the first water, and even old “Prosper” himself might have passed him without a suspicion of his identity.
He turned aside after that, from the busier thoroughfares, for he felt the need of a little thinking, and quickly found himself sauntering in front of a gray-stone building, facing an open square thickly dotted with trees.