"I am Achilles! I am Ulysses!" shouted Dicky in ecstasy. "Hermes takes me to Pluto and Queen Persephone. Ai! Ai! Ai!" and Dicky lamented in classical style. Barton looked after the pair. "You ought to be satisfied," said he to Miriam. "He is a handsome fellow, though he is a fool." "He neither looks like a fool, nor talks like one, Mr. Barton." What reply the cynic would have made to this curt contradiction it is impossible to say; but at that moment a shadow fell on the grass near them. Only the shadow--the shadow of a man; yet Barton whipped round with the sudden snarl of a startled wild beast. His snarl was even more hateful than his chuckle, and Miriam winced as she also turned to see the substance of the shadow. Even now, well-nourished, rested, and having recovered her nerve, as she had, she still dreaded Barton. There was something so uncanny about him--something akin to the satyr--to Pan, the inspirer of causeless terrors--that she could never overcome a creeping of the flesh, a sinking of the heart when in his presence. Mr. Hyde, of fictitious fame, was not more hateful. The new-comer was a tall lean man, so tall, so lean, that he might be defined in the terms of Euclid as a line, having length without breadth. His legs were long, his arms were long, even his head was long; and clothed in a suit of solemn black, which reflected no lustre, he came as a blot on the sunny landscape. His eyes were small and close together; they looked everywhere but at the person he was addressing, past you, about you, but never by any chance at you; and--as Miriam heard, not then, but long afterwards--he had a deep, booming, cracked voice, such as might come from a flawed and rusty bell. She did not know the man at the time; she had cause to know him later; and he always appeared in the same noiseless, stealthy, slinking way. If Barton was a rat, this man was akin to the serpent. And the queerness of the thing was that he did not speak to Barton, nor did Barton speak to him. The two evil creatures--Miriam instinctively felt that both were evil--looked at one another; then Barton, without a word to the governess, passed away with the stranger, for all the world as if the latter were the devil come for his soul. Perhaps Miss Crane was unduly impressionable--perhaps she had not altogether recovered her state of health--but she shuddered and grew pale to the lips as those two black figures dwindled into the distance. Involuntarily she glanced at the grass as though it had been scorched by their tread. Who was the stranger? who was Barton? She knew as much about one as she did about the other.