Just then the girls became aware of two other figures, bearing down upon them from the other side of the common--two larger personages making their slight youth look what it was, something not much more than childish. There was Mrs. Stone and the unknown gentleman who had arrived at the White House, to the scandal of the old governess, last night. When the girls perceived this they mutually gave each other’s arms a warning pressure. “Oh, look, here he is!” said Katie, and, “Is that the gentleman?” Lucy said. The encounter brought to the former a quick flush of excitement. She wondered a little, on her own account, who the gentleman was; for an apparition of such an unusual description in a girl’s school had naturally excited all the inmates. A man under Mrs. Stone’s roof! Men were common enough, things at home, and aroused no feelings of curiosity or alarm. But here it was quite different. Whence came he, and what had he come for? But besides this, there was another source of interest in Katie’s thoughts. As she conceived her own plot, a glimmering sense of the other came upon her by instinct. Why had this wonderful occurrence, this arrival of a gentleman, happened at Mrs. Stone’s? Mrs. Stone knew all about Lucy’s fortune, and the wicked scheme invented by her father (of which Katie knew nothing except by lively guesses) to keep her unmarried. And straightway the gentleman had come! She watched him anxiously as he approached. He was like Mrs. Stone, and he was not unlike the smiling and gracious face in a hairdresser’s window, complacent in wax-work satisfaction. He was large, tall, with fine black hair, whiskers and mustache, and a good complexion. He had something of that air of self-display--not vanity or conceit, but simply expansion and spreading out of himself which is characteristic of large men used to the company of many women. Katie pressed her friend’s arm more and more closely as they approached. “What do you think of him?” she said. “I wonder if they will speak to us. Will Mrs. Stone introduce us? If she does I know what I shall think.” “What shall you think?” said Lucy, across whose mind no glimmering of the cause of this unusual visit had flown. She watched him coming very placidly. “Mrs. Stone will not stop. She never does when she has any stranger with her. Who is it, Katie? I never heard that they had any brother.”