Hesketh was regarded by people in Elgin who knew who he was with the mingled cordiality and distrust that might have met a principal.

They did not perhaps say it, but it was in their minds.

"There's one of them," was what they thought when they met him in the street.

At any other time he would have been just an Englishman; now he was invested with the very romance of destiny.

The perception was obscure, but it was there.
Hesketh, on the other hand, found these good people a very well-dressed, well-conditioned, decent lot, rather sallower than he expected, perhaps, who seemed to live in a fair-sized town in a great deal of comfort, and was wholly unconscious of anything special in his relation to them or theirs to him.
He met Lorne just outside the office of Warner, Fulke, and Murchison the following day.