CHAPTER IX.

The day after his coming, and the next, for some reason the old stranger called Cameron remained in the brick house to which Harkness had brought him.  The young man, impatient for novelty, if for nothing else, began to wonder if he had sunk into some stupor of mind from which he would not emerge.  He had heard of him as a preacher, and as the conceptions of ordinary minds are made up only of the ideas directly presented to them, he had a vague notion that this old man continually preached.  As it was, he went to his work at the hotel on the third morning, and still left his strange guest in the old house, walking about in an empty room, munching some bread with his keen white teeth, his bright eyes half shut under their bushy brows.

Harkness came to the hotel disconcerted, and, meeting Eliza near the dining-room, took off his hat in sullen silence.  Several men in the room called after him as he passed.  “How’s your dancing bear, Harkness?” “How’s the ghost you’re befriending?” “How’s your coffin-gentleman?” There was a laugh that rang loudly in the large, half-empty room.

After Harkness had despatched two morning visitors, however, and was looking out of his window, as was usual in his idle intervals, he noticed several errand-boys gazing up the road, and in a minute an advancing group came within his view, old Cameron walking down the middle of the street hitting the ground nervously with his staff, and behind him children of various sizes following rather timidly.  Every now and then the old man emitted some sound—­a shout, a word of some sort, not easily understood.  It was this that had attracted the following of children, and was very quickly attracting the attention of every one in the street.  One or two men, and a woman with a shawl over her head, were coming down the sidewalks the same way and at about the same pace as the central group, and Harkness more than suspected that they had diverged from the proper course of their morning errands out of curiosity.  He took more interest in the scene than seemed consistent with his slight connection with the principal actor.  He made an excited movement toward his door, and his hand actually trembled as he opened it.  Eliza was usually about the passages at this time of day.  He called her name.

She put her head over the upper bannister.

“Come down and see Lazarus Cameron!”

“I’ll come in a minute.”

He saw through the railing of the bannisters the movement of some linen she was folding.

“He’ll be past in a minute.”  Harkness’s voice betrayed his excitement more than he desired.