ty. The ghastly thought that she had merely been keeping him on,
like a pet spaniel, to amuse her leisure moments till she should have
found appropriate opportunity for an open engagement with some one else,
trusting to his sense of chivalry to keep secret their little episode,
filled him with a grim heat.

IX.

At the back of the room the applause had been loud at the moment of the
kiss, real or counterfeit. The cause was partly owing to an exceptional
circumstance which had occurred in that quarter early in the play.

The people had all seated themselves, and the first act had begun,
when the tapestry that screened the door was lifted gently and a figure
appeared in the opening. The general attention was at this moment
absorbed by the newly disclosed stage, and scarcely a soul noticed the
stranger. Had any one of the audience turned his head, there would have
been sufficient in the countenance to detain his gaze, notwithstanding
the counter-attraction forward.

He was obviously a man who had come from afar. There was not a square
inch about him that had anything to do with modern English life. His
visage, which was of the colour of light porphyry, had little of its
original surface left; it was a face which had been the plaything of
strange fires or pestilences, that had moulded to whatever shape they
chose his originally supple skin, and left it pitted, puckered, and
seamed like a dried water-course. But though dire catastrophes or
the treacherous airs of remote climates had done their worst upon his
exterior, they seemed to have affected him but little within, to judge
from a certain robustness which showed itself in his manner of standing.

The face-marks had a meaning, for any one who could read them, beyond
the mere suggestion of their origin: they signified that this man
had either been the victim of some terrible necessity as regarded the
occupation to which he had devoted himself, or that he was a man of
dogged obstinacy, from sheer sang froid holding his ground amid malign
forces when others would have fled affrighted away.

As nobody noticed him, he dropped the door hangings after a while,
walked silently along the matted alley, and sat down in one of the back
chairs. His manner of entry was enough to show that the strength of
character which he seemed to possess had phlegm for its base and not
ardour. One might have said that perhaps the shocks he had passed
through had taken all his original warm