."

But the passing glow had faded from her young cheeks, and her eyes
wandered again to her book. "He pays his rent regularly every steamer
night," she said, quietly, as if dismissing an exhausted subject, "and
he'll be here in a moment, I dare say." She took up her book, and
leaning her head on her hand, once more became absorbed in its pages.

An uneasy silence followed. The rain beat against the windows, the
ticking of a clock became audible, but still Mr. Nott sat with vacant
eyes fixed on his daughter's face, and the constrained smile on his
lips. He was conscious that he had never seen her look so pretty
before, yet he could not tell why this was no longer an unalloyed
satisfaction. Not but that he had always accepted the admiration of
others for her as a matter of course, but for the first time he became
conscious that she not only had an interest in others, but apparently a
superior knowledge of them. How did she know these things about this
man, and why had she only now accidentally spoken of them? HE would
have done so. All this passed so vaguely through his unreflective
mind, that he was unable to retain any decided impression, but the
far-reaching one that his lodger had obtained some occult influence
over her through the exhibition of his baleful skill in the horsehair
speculation. "Them tricks is likely to take a young girl's fancy. I
must look arter her," he said to himself softly.

A slow regular step in the gangway interrupted his paternal
reflections. Hastily buttoning across his chest the pea-jacket which
he usually wore at home as a single concession to his nautical
surroundings, he drew himself up with something of the assumption of a
ship-master, despite certain bucolic suggestions of his boots and legs.
The footsteps approached nearer, and a tall figure suddenly stood in
the doorway.

It was a figure so extraordinary that even in the strange masquerade of
that early civilization it was remarkable; a figure with whom father
and daughter were already familiar without abatement of wonder--the
figure of a rejuvenated old man, padded, powdered, dyed, and painted to
the verge of caricature, but without a single suggestion of
ludicrousness or humor. A face so artificial that it seemed almost a
mask, but, like a mask, more pathetic than amusing. He was dressed in
the extreme of fashion of a dozen years before; his pearl gray trousers
strapped tightly over his varnished boots, his volumino