The studied amiability of these remarks struck Faversham as surprising, he hardly knew why.  Suddenly, a phrase emerged in memory.

“Every one about here calls him the Ogre.”

The girl by the river—­was it?  He could not remember.  Why!—­the Ogre was tame enough.  But the conversation—­the longest he had yet held—­had exhausted him.  He turned on his side, and shut his eyes.

* * * * *

Then gradually, day by day, he came to understand the externals, at any rate, of the situation.  Undershaw gave him a guarded, though still graphic, account of how, as unconscious as the dead Cid strapped on his warhorse, he and his bodyguard had stormed the Tower.  The jests of the nurse, as to the practical difficulties of living in such a house, enlightened him further.  Melrose, it appeared, lived like a peasant, and spent like a peasant.  They brought him tales of the locked rooms, of the passages huddled and obstructed with bric-a-brac, of the standing feuds between Melrose and his tenants.  None of the ordinary comforts of life existed in the Tower, except indeed a vast warming apparatus which kept it like an oven in winter; the only personal expenditure, beyond bare necessaries, that Melrose allowed himself.  Yet it was commonly believed that he was enormously rich, and that he still spent enormously on his collections.  Undershaw had attended a London stockbroker staying in one of the Keswick hotels, who had told him, for instance, that Melrose was well known to the “House” as one of the largest holders of Argentine stock in the world, and as having made also immense sums out of Canadian land and railways.  “The sharpest old fox going,” said the Londoner, himself, according to Undershaw, no feeble specimen of the money-making tribe. “His death duties will be worth raking in!”

Occasional gossip of this, or a more damaging kind, enlivened convalescence.  Undershaw and the nurses had no motives for reticence.  Melrose treated them uncivilly throughout; and Undershaw knew very well that he should never be forgiven the forcing of the house.  And as he, the nurses, and the Dixons were firmly convinced that for every farthing of the accommodation supplied him Faversham would ultimately have to pay handsomely, there seemed to be no particular call for gratitude, or for a forbearance based upon it.

Meanwhile Faversham himself did not find the character and intentions of his host so easy to understand.  Although very weak, and with certain serious symptoms still persisting to worry the minds of doctor and nurse, he was now regularly dressed of an afternoon, and would sit in a large armchair—­which had had to be hired from Keswick—­by one of the windows looking out on the courtyard.  Punctually at tea-time Melrose appeared.  And there was no denying that in general he proved himself an agreeable companion—­a surprisingly agreeable companion.  He would come slouching in, wearing the shabbiest clothes, and a