t, and
scarcely know whether I ought to take his word in her absence. Mrs.
Goodman, Miss Power's relative, who usually attends to these things, is
away.'

'I dare say it is all right,' said Somerset.

'Would you mind seeing him? If you think it quite in order, perhaps you
will instruct him where the best views are to be obtained?'

Thereupon Somerset at once went down to Mr. Dare. His coming as a sort
of counterfeit of Miss Power disposed Somerset to judge him with as much
severity as justice would allow, and his manner for the moment was not
of a kind calculated to dissipate antagonistic instincts. Mr. Dare was
standing before the fireplace with his feet wide apart, and his hands
in the pockets of his coat-tails, looking at a carving over the
mantelpiece. He turned quickly at the sound of Somerset's footsteps, and
revealed himself as a person quite out of the common.

His age it was impossible to say. There was not a hair on his face which
could serve to hang a guess upon. In repose he appeared a boy; but his
actions were so completely those of a man that the beholder's first
estimate of sixteen as his age was hastily corrected to six-and-twenty,
and afterwards shifted hither and thither along intervening years as
the tenor of his sentences sent him up or down. He had a broad forehead,
vertical as the face of a bastion, and his hair, which was parted in
the middle, hung as a fringe or valance above, in the fashion sometimes
affected by the other sex. He wore a heavy ring, of which the gold
seemed fair, the diamond questionable, and the taste indifferent. There
were the remains of a swagger in his body and limbs as he came forward,
regarding Somerset with a confident smile, as if the wonder were, not
why Mr. Dare should be present, but why Somerset should be present
likewise; and the first tone that came from Dare's lips wound up his
listener's opinion that he did not like him.

A latent power in the man, or boy, was revealed by the circumstance that
Somerset did not feel, as he would ordinarily have done, that
it was a matter of profound indifference to him whether this
gentleman-photographer were a likeable person or no.

'I have called by appointment; or rather, I left a card stating that
to-day would suit me, and no objection was made.' Somerset recognized
the voice; it was that of the invisible stranger who had talked with the
landlord about the De Stancys. Mr. Dare then proceeded to explain his
business.