Hanger, feeling some responsibility about the man he had introduced, approached him with marked urbanity, and offered his services—­

“I know Marquise and Wimille.”

“Wimille! that’s it!” the stranger cried.  “Right you are.  That’s my direction.  This is business.  Yes, between Marquise and Wimille.”

“Precisely,” Hanger continued, as we proceeded towards the door.

I heard the major growl between his teeth in our rear—­“Hanger’s got him well in tow.”

I should have been glad to show the man his way, and leave him to follow it; but Hanger, who could not resist an adventure, drew me aside and said—­“We may as well drive to Marquise as anywhere else.  We shall be back easily for the table d’hote.”  The expedition was not to my taste; but I yielded.  The stranger was glad of our company, for the reason, which he bluntly explained, that we might be of some use to him; for the place was not exactly at Marquise nor at Wimille.  We hired a carriage, and were soon clattering along the Calais road, muffled to our noses to face the icy wind.

The stranger soon communicated his name, saying, “My name is Reuben Sharp, and I don’t care who knows it.  Ask who Reuben Sharp is at Maidstone:  they’ll tell you.”

Reuben Sharp was a respectable farmer—­it was not necessary for him to tell us that.  He was a man something over fifty:  sharp eyes, round head, ruddy face, short hair flaked with white, which he matted over his forehead at intervals with a flaming bandanna; a voice built to call across a field or two; limbs equal to any country work or sport.  In short, an individual as peculiar to England as her chalk cliffs.  When he found that we knew something—­and more than something—­of the hunting-field, and that I knew his country, including Squire Lufton, to say nothing of the Lion at Farningham (one of the sweetest and most charming hostelries in all England), he took me to his heart, and told me his mission and his grief.

“I don’t know how I shall meet him,” Reuben Sharp said; “I’m not quite certain about myself.  The man I’m going to see—­this Matthew Glendore—­has done me and mine a bitter wrong.  The villain brought dishonour on my family.  I knew he was in difficulties when he came into our parts, and took two rooms in Mother Gaselee’s cottage.  But he was a gentleman, every inch of it, in appearance.  A d—­d good shot; rode well; and—­you know what fools girls are!”

I could only listen:  any question might prove a most indiscreet one.  Hanger was not quite so sensitive.  “Fools!” he cried—­“they are answerable for more mischief in the world than all the men and children, and the rest of the animal creation put together.”

“And yet no man’s worth a woman’s little finger, if you know what I mean,” Reuben Sharp went on, struggling manfully to get clear expression for the tumult of painful feeling that was in him.  “They don’t know what the world is; you cannot make ’em understand.  The best fall into the hands of the worst men.  She was the best, and he was the worst:  the best, that she was.  And I sent him to her, where she was living like an honest woman, and learning to be a lady, in London.”