We spread a napkin on a broad flat stone, and our lunch on top of that. I now discovered why the basket had been so heavy, but, though it had been a nuisance carrying it, its contents were extremely welcome. We had almost finished when a peculiar feeling rather than a sound made me look up, and I saw a man standing not more than three or four yards from us. It was as if he had risen out of the earth. When you are under the impression that you are miles away from any human being, such a sudden apparition is a little startling, nor was the appearance of this visitor reassuring. He was large and pale, with short brown hair, and at the back of his head he wore a cap, like a boy’s cap, which was too small for him. His clothes, without being ragged, were stained and worn, and of a nondescript, brownish colour. He was young, probably between twenty-five and thirty, and strongly built. There was something coldly malevolent in the pale, clean-shaved face, something indescribably corrupt and cruel, which seemed to stare out of the hard brown eyes, and to hover about the smiling lips. He stood before us, looking down in obvious enjoyment of our discomfiture, making no movement to pass on. It was curious that features so perfectly regular, features neither bloated nor disfigured, could give so vivid an impression of ugliness. It was the ugliness of something positively evil, and my first feeling was one of instinctive repugnance and disgust, as if I had been touched by an obscene and noxious creature. I felt, I can’t say why, that I was in the presence of something actively dangerous, and not only to my body, but reaching beyond that: I felt as if I were in the presence of some form of spiritual corruption or decay, that I knew nothing about, and that yet I had a horror of, as a young rabbit is afraid of a hawk. That prolonged, impudent stare, passing over me, seemed to leave a trail of filth, of slime, of something that defiled like a loathsome caress. His eyes slid from me to Katherine with the same repulsive scrutiny. What was he doing here? He was no country man. As my first startled feeling passed, my temper began to rise. “What do you want?” I asked. “How much longer are you going to stand there?”