“Thank you,” he said at the same time, and did not stir until she was closing the door.  Then he swung round and approached the table with a certain eager quickness.

As she went behind the bar to the kitchen she heard a sound repeated at regular intervals.  Chirk, chirk, chirk, it went, the sound of a spoon being rapidly whisked round a basin.  “That girl!” she said.  “There!  I clean forgot it.  It’s her being so long!” And while she herself finished mixing the mustard, she gave Millie a few verbal stabs for her excessive slowness.  She had cooked the ham and eggs, laid the table, and done everything, while Millie (help indeed!) had only succeeded in delaying the mustard.  And him a new guest and wanting to stay!  Then she filled the mustard pot, and, putting it with a certain stateliness upon a gold and black tea-tray, carried it into the parlour.

She rapped and entered promptly.  As she did so her visitor moved quickly, so that she got but a glimpse of a white object disappearing behind the table.  It would seem he was picking something from the floor.  She rapped down the mustard pot on the table, and then she noticed the overcoat and hat had been taken off and put over a chair in front of the fire, and a pair of wet boots threatened rust to her steel fender.  She went to these things resolutely.  “I suppose I may have them to dry now,” she said in a voice that brooked no denial.

“Leave the hat,” said her visitor, in a muffled voice, and turning she saw he had raised his head and was sitting and looking at her.

For a moment she stood gaping at him, too surprised to speak.

He held a white cloth—­it was a serviette he had brought with him—­over the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws were completely hidden, and that was the reason of his muffled voice.  But it was not that which startled Mrs. Hall.  It was the fact that all his forehead above his blue glasses was covered by a white bandage, and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose.  It was bright, pink, and shiny just as it had been at first.  He wore a dark-brown velvet jacket with a high, black, linen-lined collar turned up about his neck.  The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable.  This muffled and bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated, that for a moment she was rigid.

He did not remove the serviette, but remained holding it, as she saw now, with a brown gloved hand, and regarding her with his inscrutable blue glasses.  “Leave the hat,” he said, speaking very distinctly through the white cloth.

Her nerves began to recover from the shock they had received.  She placed the hat on the chair again by the fire.  “I didn’t know, sir,” she began, “that—­” and she stopped embarrassed.