scrutiny.

CHAPTER XXIV.

'NOW NOTHING LEFT TO LOVE OR HATE.'

The old man sat looking at Mary in silence for some moments; not a great
space of time, perhaps, as marked by the shadow on the dial behind them,
but to Mary that gaze was unpleasantly prolonged. He looked at her as if
he could read every pulsation in every fibre of her brain, and knew
exactly what it meant.

'Who are you?' he asked, at last.

'My name is Mary Haselden.'

'Haselden,' he repeated musingly, 'I have heard that name before.'

And then he resumed his former attitude, his chin resting on the handle
of his crutch-stick, his eyes bent upon the gravel path, their unholy
brightness hidden under the penthouse brows.

'Haselden,' he murmured, and repeated the name over and over again,
slowly, dreamily, with a troubled tone, like some one trying to work out
a difficult problem. 'Haselden--when? where?'

And then with a profound sigh he muttered, 'Harmless, quite harmless.
You may trust him anywhere. Memory a blank, a blank, a blank, my lord!'

His head sank lower upon his breast, and again he sighed, the sigh of a
spirit in torment, Mary thought. Her vivid imagination was already
interested, her quick sympathies were awakened.

She looked at him wonderingly, compassionately. So old, so infirm, and
with a mind astray; and yet there were indications in his speech and
manner that told of reason struggling against madness, like the light
behind storm-clouds. He had tones that spoke of a keen sensitiveness to
pain, not the lunatic's imbecile placidity. She observed him intently,
trying to make out what manner of man he was.

He did not belong to the peasant class: of that she felt assured. The
shrunken, tapering hand had never worked at peasant's work. The profile
turned towards her was delicate to effeminacy. The man's clothes were
shabby and old-fashioned, but they were a gentleman's garments, the
cloth of a finer texture than she had ever seen worn by her brother. The
coat, with its velvet collar, was of an old-world fashion. She
remembered having seen just such a coat in an engraved portrait of Count
d'Orsay, a print nearly fifty years old. No Dalesman born and bred ever
wore such a coat; no tailor in the Dales could have made it.

The old man looked up after a long pause, during which Mary felt afraid
to move. He looked at her again with inquiring eyes, as if her presence
there had only just become known to him.

'Who are you?'