‘You pardon me?’

‘Certainly.  I should have done it myself.’

‘I cannot offer you my apologies as a stranger.’  Lord Fleetwood was the name given.

Woodseer’s plebeian was exchanged for it, and he stood up.

The young lord had fair, straight, thin features, with large restless eyes that lighted quickly, and a mouth that was winning in his present colloquial mood.

’You could have done the same?  I should find it hard to forgive the man who pried into my secret thoughts,’ he remarked.

‘There they are.  If one puts them to paper! . . .’  Woodseer shrugged.

’Yes, yes.  They never last long enough with me.  So far I’m safe.  One page led to another.  You can meditate.  I noticed some remarks on Religions.  You think deeply.’

Woodseer was of that opinion, but modesty urged him to reply with a small flourish.  ’Just a few heads of ideas.  When the wind puffs down a sooty chimney the air is filled with little blacks that settle pretty much like the notes in this book of mine.  There they wait for another puff, or my fingers to stamp them.’

‘I could tell you were the owner of that book,’ said Lord Fleetwood.  He swept his forehead feverishly.  ’What a power it is to relieve one’s brain by writing!  May I ask you, which one of the Universities . . . ?’

The burden of this question had a ring of irony to one whom it taught to feel rather defiantly, that he carried the blazon of a reeking tramp.  ’My University,’ Woodseer replied, ’was a merchant’s office in Bremen for some months.  I learnt more Greek and Latin in Bremen than business.  I was invalided home, and then tried a merchant’s office in London.  I put on my hat one day, and walked into the country.  My College fellows were hawkers, tinkers, tramps and ploughmen, choughs and crows.  A volume of our Poets and a History of Philosophy composed my library.  I had scarce any money, so I learnt how to idle inexpensively—­a good first lesson.  We’re at the bottom of the world when we take to the road; we see men as they were in the beginning—­not so eager for harness till they get acquainted with hunger, as I did, and studied in myself the old animal having his head pushed into the collar to earn a feed of corn.’

Woodseer laughed, adding, that he had been of a serious mind in those days of the alternation of smooth indifference and sharp necessity, and he had plucked a flower from them.

His nature prompted him to speak of himself with simple candour, as he had done spontaneously to Chillon Kirby, yet he was now anxious to let his companion know at once the common stuff he was made of, together with the great stuff he contained.  He grew conscious of an over-anxiety, and was uneasy, recollecting how he had just spoken about his naturalness, dimly if at all apprehending the cause of this disturbance within.  What is a lord to a philosopher!  But the world is around us as a cloak, if not a coat; in his ignorance he supposed it specially due to a lord seeking acquaintance with him, that he should expose his condition:  doing the which appeared to subject him to parade his intellectual treasures and capacity for shaping sentences; and the effect upon Lord Fleetwood was an incentive to the display.  Nevertheless he had a fretful desire to escape from the discomposing society of a lord; he fixed his knapsack and began to saunter.