“And you know my quarters,” said Hugh, shaking him by the hand.  “I am greatly obliged to you.”

“Not a bit, sir.  Or gin ye war, ye sud be hertily welcome.”

“Bring candles, Mrs. Ashton,” Falconer called from the door.  Then, turning to Hugh, “Sit down, Mr. Sutherland,” he said, “if you can find a chair that is not illegally occupied already.  Perhaps we had better wait for the candles.  What a pleasant day we have had!”

“Then you have been more pleasantly occupied than I have,” thought Hugh, to whose mind returned the images of the Appleditch family and its drawing-room, followed by the anticipation of the distasteful duties of the morrow.  But he only said: 

“It has been a most pleasant day.”

“I spent it strangely,” said Falconer.

Here the candles were brought in.

The two men looked at each other full in the face.  Hugh saw that he had not been in error.  The same remarkable countenance was before him.  Falconer smiled.

“We have met before,” said he.

“We have,” said Hugh.

“I had a conviction we should be better acquainted, but I did not expect it so soon.”

“Are you a clairvoyant, then?”

“Not in the least.”

“Or, perhaps, being a Scotchman, you have the second sight?”

“I am hardly Celt enough for that.  But I am a sort of a seer, after all —­ from an instinct of the spiritual relations of things, I hope; not in the least from the nervo-material side.”

“I think I understand you.”

“Are you at leisure?”

“Entirely.”

“Had we not better walk, then?  I have to go as far as Somers Town —­ no great way; and we can talk as well walking as sitting.”

“With pleasure,” answered Hugh, rising.

“Will you take anything before you go?  A glass of port?  It is the only wine I happen to have.”

“Not a drop, thank you.  I seldom taste anything stronger than water.”

“I like that.  But I like a glass of port too.  Come then.”

And Falconer rose —­ and a great rising it was; for, as I have said, he was two or three inches taller than Hugh, and much broader across the shoulders; and Hugh was no stripling now.  He could not help thinking again of his old friend, David Elginbrod, to whom he had to look up to find the living eyes of him, just as now he looked up to find Falconer’s.  But there was a great difference between those organs in the two men.  David’s had been of an ordinary size, pure keen blue, sparkling out of cerulean depths of peace and hope, full of lambent gleams when he was loving any one, and ever ready to be dimmed with the mists of rising emotion.  All that Hugh could yet discover of Falconer’s eyes was, that they were large, and black as night, and set so far back in his head, that each gleamed out of its caverned arch like the reversed torch of the Greek Genius of Death, just before going out in night.  Either the frontal sinus was very large, or his observant faculties were peculiarly developed.