“Oh, not at all. And then--there was a further complication--there was a man, and he pestered me--annoyed me--molested me, in fact, till I got ill. It was not all the fault of the type-writing, you see”--she had a wan, well-executed smile under her veil. “My life was a torment to me. He followed me about; he even threatened to shoot me! You may have read about it in the papers.” “No, I never have.” His voice betrayed no interest. “People do such dreadful things, sometimes!” she observed, vaguely, to Nature at large, for the artist had become quite absorbed in his work and seemed to be paying no attention to what she was saying. “He is all the time wishing me at the devil!” she thought to herself, but she did not go. She was perforce silent awhile, but took the opportunity to look closely at and focus this personage who had so completely filled up her field of vision. “He looks rather like a foreign sailor, such as one sees on the quays at Newcastle,” she thought. “He only wants earrings to complete the effect. I suppose it is because he is so sunburnt, and his eyes are so dark. They are like brown pools--like the river here, as if they grew like what they looked on. There are all sorts of little wrinkles round them--not money wrinkles, as I always call Mortimer’s--but wrinkles that come of screwing up his eyes to see effects, and shutting one of them altogether now and then, as he is doing. He talks languidly, like a society man, as if everything was a bore, but then his eager eyes are all over the place. I like that greyish hair in so young a man--it is ‘a sable silvered,’ as Hamlet said of his father. What a beautiful mouth! It is like a woman’s, and yet it is strong. His moustache hides it a good deal. Well, a mouth like that should not be too obvious to the vulgar eye. It tells too much. He is very thin. I wonder if he is delicate? No, not with a figure like that--he must be strong, and his instep is beautifully arched--that comes of springing about these rocks--people grow flat-footed in Newcastle....” She started suddenly. “Why am I sitting here beside a strange man of whose existence I did not even know an hour ago? It is as if I had been here all my life! I ought to go, of course, but where?”