But in Landresdale the name of Oliver Tredethlyn was almost as well known as that of the Marquis himself; and in Landresdale Francis hoped to learn the true story of his cousin’s fate. He stood now looking out of the window into the rustic highway, as quiet in the summer evening calm as if it had been a street in one of the buried cities of Italy, as peaceful in its drowsy aspect as if no palpitating human heart had ever carried its daily burden of care and sorrow along the narrow footways, beneath the shadow of the peaked roofs and quaint abutting upper stories. He stood looking out, and remembering himself a boy in that old hill-side street; he stood there now, wondering alike at the past and the present, which by contrast seemed both equally strange and unnatural; he stood there in all the flush and vigour of his youth, a tall, broad-shouldered, simple-hearted soldier, with a fortune far exceeding the narrow limits of his arithmetical powers, as ignorant of all the real world that lay before him as a little country lad who rides to town upon the top of a load of hay and expects to find the streets paved with gold, and the Queen dressed in her crown and robes, and sitting on her throne with the ball and sceptre in her hands for ever and ever. The landlord of the Crown came bustling in presently with a wooden tray of knives and forks, and glasses and cruets, that would have amply served for a dinner-party of half-a-dozen. He laid the cloth with great ceremony, although with a certain air of briskness inseparable from innkeeping, even in the laziest and dullest village in all England; and he kept a furtive watch upon his guest throughout all his operations, from the preparatory polishing down of the mahogany table, to the final flourish with which he removed a very large cover from a very small rumpsteak. “I think I ought to know you, sir,” he said, courteously, as Francis Tredethlyn seated himself at the table. “I think you ought, Joseph Penruffin; I think you ought to remember Francis Tredethlyn, son of your old friend John Tredethlyn, of Pen Gorbold, who was a little bit too friendly in this house, perhaps, for his own prosperity.” “Francis Tredethlyn!” cried the landlord, clapping his hand upon his knee, “Francis Tredethlyn! To be sure it is! To think that I should forget a face that was once as familiar to me as my own son’s! Francis Tredethlyn! Why, I remember you a lad playing cricket on the green yonder with my own boys. And you’ve come into a very fine fortune, sir, I understand; and I hope you will excuse the liberty, if I make so bold as to wish you every happiness with it, Francis Tredethlyn. Lord bless us and save us! why, I can remember you a little bit of a toddling child coming into Landresdale Church with your mother on a summer Sunday morning, as if it was yesterday! I ask pardon for being so bold and free-like, but the sight of your face takes me back to old times, and I’m apt to forget myself.”