that he had no wish to speak I was silent also, but I
could not help watching him out of the corners of my
eyes, for he was such a wonderful survival of the
early half of the century, with his low-crowned,
curly-brimmed hat, his black satin tie which fastened
with a buckle at the back, and, above all, his large,
fleshy, clean-shaven face shot with its mesh of
wrinkles. Those eyes, ere they had grown dim, had
looked out from the box-seat of mail coaches, and had
seen the knots of navvies as they toiled on the
brown embankments. Those lips had smiled over the
first numbers of "Pickwick," and had gossiped of the
promising young man who wrote them. The face itself
was a seventy-year almanack, and every seam an entry
upon it where public as well as private sorrow left
its trace. That pucker on the forehead stood for the
Mutiny, perhaps; that line of care for the Crimean
winter, it may be; and that last little sheaf of
wrinkles, as my fancy hoped, for the death of
Gordon. And so, as I dreamed in my foolish way, the
old gentleman with the shining stock was gone, and it
was seventy years of a great nation's life that took
shape before me on the headland in the morning.

But he soon brought me back to earth again. As
he recovered his breath he took a letter out of his
pocket, and, putting on a pair of horn-rimmed eye-
glasses, he read it through very carefully. Without
any design of playing the spy I could not help
observing that it was in a woman's hand. When he had