thatched roof could be seen.

Stanley was distinctly nervous. It was not a weakness his face and
figure were very capable of showing, but he felt that dryness of mouth
and quivering of chest which precede adventures of the soul. Advancing
up the steps and pebbled path, which Clara had trodden once, just
nineteen years ago, and he himself but three times as yet in all, he
cleared his throat and said to himself: 'Easy, old man! What is it,
after all? She won't bite!' And in the very doorway he came upon her.

What there was about this woman to produce in a man of common sense
such peculiar sensations, he no more knew after seeing her than before.
Felix, on returning from his visit, had said, "She's like a Song of
the Hebrides sung in the middle of a programme of English ballads." The
remark, as any literary man's might, had conveyed nothing to Stanley,
and that in a far-fetched way. Still, when she said: "Will you come in?"
he felt heavier and thicker than he had ever remembered feeling; as
a glass of stout might feel coming across a glass of claret. It was,
perhaps, the gaze of her eyes, whose color he could not determine, under
eyebrows that waved in the middle and twitched faintly, or a dress that
was blue, with the queerest effect of another color at the back of it,
or perhaps the feeling of a torrent flowing there under a coat of ice,
that might give way in little holes, so that your leg went in but
not the whole of you. Something, anyway, made him feel both small
and heavy--that awkward combination for a man accustomed to associate
himself with cheerful but solid dignity. In seating himself by request
at a table, in what seemed to be a sort of kitchen, he experienced a
singular sensation in the legs, and heard her say, as it might be to the
air:

"Biddy, dear, take Susie and Billy out."

And thereupon a little girl with a sad and motherly face came crawling
out from underneath the table, and dropped him a little courtesy. Then
another still smaller girl came out, and a very small boy, staring with
all his eyes.

All these things were against Stanley, and he felt that if he did not
make it quite clear that he was there he would soon not know where he
was.

"I came," he said, "to talk about this business up at Malloring's." And,
encouraged by having begun, he added: "Whose kids were those?"

A level voice with a faint lisp answered him:

"They belong to a man called Tryst; he was turned out of his cottage o