If I could get permission I would steal an hour
or two from sleep to eye them over, and as we walked towards the hearth I
got behind my host in my slowness and had to step up smartly to get level
with him to make my bow of introduction. I gasped with the shock as I
stepped into the arms of Master John Freake.
"My dear lad," he cried, "what luck! What luck! How are you? How are they?"
He made me sit down beside him, for here as elsewhere he was easily the
most important man present, though his bearing was ever quiet and modest.
He spoke of me to Sir James in warm and kindly phrases, and it soon became
manifest that his good word was a passport into my host's confidence and
regard. The three gentlemen filled their glasses and toasted me with grave
courtesy, and I easily slid out of the uneasy mood into which Inskip's
candour and my unaccustomed surroundings had driven me.
The third man present was a Welsh baronet, Sir Griffith Williams, a
far-away cousin and close friend of Sir Watkin Wynne, whose name I
remembered to have heard on the Colonel's lips at Leek. Sir Griffith was a
brisk, apple-cheeked man of forty or thereabouts, very fluent of speech in
somewhat uncertain English, with fewer ideas in his head than there are
pips in a codlin, but what there were of them singularly clear and
precise.
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