Heaven knows if, with all the aids of civilisation, soap and water, close-cut hair, and carefully-trimmed moustache, the man might not have been ranked handsome. Seen in this dusky hovel, by the changeful light of the pine-logs, that face was grotesque and grim as a study by Gustave Doré; the lines as sharply accentuated, the lights and shadows as vividly contrasted. The stranger’s eyes were of darkest hue; as nearly black as the human eye, or any other eye, ever is: that intensest brown which, when in shadow, looks black, and when the light shines upon it seems to emit a tawny fire, like the ray which flashes from a fine cat’s-eye. His forehead was curiously low, the hair growing in a peak between the temples. His nose was long, and a pronounced aquiline. His cheek-bones were rendered prominent by famine. The rest of his face was almost hidden by the thick ragged beard of densest black, through which his white teeth flashed with a hungry look when he talked or smiled. His smile was not a pleasant one. ‘If one could imagine his Satanic majesty taking another promenade, like that walk made famous by Porson, and penetrating to these hyperborean shores—and why not, when contrast is ever pleasing?—I should expect to behold him precisely in yonder guise,’ mused Geoffrey, as he contemplated their uninvited guest from the opposite side of the hearth. ‘But the age has grown matter-of-fact; we no longer believe in the pleasing illusions of our childhood—hobgoblins, Jack and the Beanstalk, and old Nick. Gunpowder and the printing press, as somebody observes, have driven away Robin Goodfellow and the fairies.’ Lucius sat meditative, staring into the fire. That wild minor theme had moved him profoundly, yet it was not so much of the music that he thought as of the man. Five years ago he had heard the description of music—which seemed to him to correspond exactly with this—of an amateur whose playing had the same unearthly, or even diabolical excellence. Certainly that man had been a pianist. And then it was too wild a fancy to conceive for a moment that he had encountered that man, whom he had hunted for all over England, and even out of England, here in this primeval forest. Destiny in her maddest sport could hardly have devised such a hazard. No, the thought was absurd; no doubt an evidence of a brain enfeebled by anxiety and famine. Yet the fancy disturbed him not the less. ‘Unless Geoff stalks another buffalo before long, I shall go off my head,’ he said to himself. He brooded upon the stranger’s assertion that he was a Southern American, and had never crossed the Atlantic; an assertion at variance with the fact of his accent, which was purely English. Yet Lucius had known American citizens whose English was as pure, and he could scarcely condemn the man as a liar on such ground as this.