While she stood for a few moments meditating thus, the old man raised his head and looked up at her, with eyes that burned like red-hot coals under his shaggy white brows.  The look scared her.  There was something awful in it, like the gaze of an evil spirit, a soul in torment, and she began to move away, with side-long steps, her eyes riveted on that uncanny countenance.

‘Don’t go,’ said the man, with an authoritative air, rattling his bony fingers upon the bench.  ’Sit down here by my side, and talk to me.  Don’t be frightened, child.  You wouldn’t, if you knew what they say of me indoors.’  He made a motion of his head towards the windows of the old wing—­’"Harmless,” they say, “quite harmless.  Let him alone, he’s harmless.”  A tiger with his claws cut and his teeth drawn—­an old, grey-bearded tiger, ghastly and grim, but harmless—­a cobra with the poison-bag plucked out of his jaw!  The venom grows again, child—­the snake’s venom—­but youth never comes back:  Old, and helpless, and harmless!’

Again Mary tried to move away, but those evil eyes held her as if she were a bird riveted by the gaze of a serpent.

‘Why do you shrink away?’ asked the old man, frowning at her.  ’Sit down here, and let me talk to you.  I am accustomed to be obeyed’

Old and feeble and shrunken as he was, there was a power in his tone of command which Mary was unable to resist.  She felt very sure that he was imbecile or mad.  She knew that madmen are apt to imagine themselves great personages, and to take upon themselves, with a wonderful power of impersonation, the dignity and authority of their imaginary rank; and she supposed that it must be thus with this strange old man.  She struggled against her sense of terror.  After all there could be no real danger, in the broad daylight, within the precincts of her own home, within call of the household.

She seated herself on the bench by the unknown, willing to humour him a little; and he turned himself about slowly, as if every bone in his body were stiff with age, and looked at her with a deliberate 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?’