she glanced at people who were passing; there were intervals when
she wholly lost herself in reverie. She was tired, and had even a
slight headache. When the hand of the clock pointed to half-past
three, she closed the volume from which she had been copying
extracts, and began to collect her papers.

A voice spoke close behind her.

'Where's your father, Miss Yule?'

The speaker was a man of sixty, short, stout, tonsured by the
hand of time. He had a broad, flabby face, the colour of an
ancient turnip, save where one of the cheeks was marked with a
mulberry stain; his eyes, grey-orbed in a yellow setting, glared
with good-humoured inquisitiveness, and his mouth was that of the
confirmed gossip. For eyebrows he had two little patches of
reddish stubble; for moustache, what looked like a bit of
discoloured tow, and scraps of similar material hanging beneath
his creasy chin represented a beard. His garb must have seen a
great deal of Museum service; it consisted of a jacket, something
between brown and blue, hanging in capacious shapelessness, a
waistcoat half open for lack of buttons and with one of the
pockets coming unsewn, a pair of bronze-hued trousers which had
all run to knee. Necktie he had none, and his linen made distinct
appeal to the laundress.

Marian shook hands with him.

'He went away at half-past two,' was her reply to his question.