"Oh, no, Miss! It's the gentleman with the cigar and the thick stockings."
The fact that the puffer of the cigar was staring at us without the slightest attempt at dissimulation made it easier for me to take him in from top to toe. The top was hidden in a grey cloth cap, and the toe in a brown boot of a large size. The creature was large-handed, large-featured, and (as I afterwards found) large-laughed and large-voiced. He wore a grey Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, continued downwards by the thick grey stockings which had vied with the cigar in Susan's regard. There was a bold ring on the little (or, rather, on the smallest) finger of his left hand. His whole port and mien were idle and evil; and never in my life have I seen more horrid legs.
At a first glance his coarseness was so evidently the coarseness of a low-bred shopman or bookie, that I nearly turned on Susan to rebuke her sharply for wasting my time. But, at a second glance, I became conscious of a sickening doubt. Had I not seen this identical coarseness before, in very high places?
Apart from his one unilluminating letter to Susan, all my meagre knowledge of Lord Ruddington has been collected at second or third hand. Both Alice and I have heard that he is reticent, aloof, rather studious; and the stray reports of him which have reached Traxelby have been pretty much to the same effect. But our informants may have been wrong. Or, as our information is a year old, Lord Ruddington may have changed for the worse. If so, he has galloped downhill at the devil's own pace.
When I had seen a good deal more than enough, I turned my back on him pointedly, and said to Susan:
"Move your chair a little--the way the boat's going. The wind can't hurt you."
"What makes you think it is he, Susan?" I demanded.
"No, Miss," answered Susan. "It's just a dreadful feeling that keeps coming over me."
"Then the sooner you put the dreadful feeling on one side, the better," I said unpleasantly. "I hardly call it complimentary to Lord Ruddington that you should mistake him for a man like that."
Susan began her new pout--the bride-elect pout that was never in Susan's world till last Thursday. It annoyed me.
"Why," I said, "if that's Lord Ruddington, all I can say is that poor Gibson is fit to be a duke or a prince beside him."
