the spot, his new acquaintance following him. As they drew near
there seemed a sort of monstrous irony in the fact that the dead
machine was still throbbing and thundering as busily as a factory,
while the man lay so still.

He was unquestionably dead. The blood flowed in the grass from a
hopelessly fatal fracture at the back of the skull; but the face,
which was turned to the sun, was uninjured and strangely arresting
in itself. It was one of those cases of a strange face so
unmistakable as to feel familiar. We feel, somehow, that we ought to
recognize it, even though we do not. It was of the broad, square
sort with great jaws, almost like that of a highly intellectual ape;
the wide mouth shut so tight as to be traced by a mere line; the
nose short with the sort of nostrils that seem to gape with an
appetite for the air. The oddest thing about the face was that one
of the eyebrows was cocked up at a much sharper angle than the
other. March thought he had never seen a face so naturally alive as
that dead one. And its ugly energy seemed all the stranger for its
halo of hoary hair. Some papers lay half fallen out of the pocket,
and from among them March extracted a card-case. He read the name on
the card aloud.

"Sir Humphrey Turnbull. I'm sure I've heard that name somewhere."

His companion only gave a sort of a little sigh and was silent for a
moment, as if ruminating, then he merely said, "The poor fellow is
quite gone," and added some scientific terms in which his auditor
once more found himself out of his depth.

"As things are," continued the same curiously well-informed person,