“No, but I’d take his own face, miss. I watched him when the old farmer was going on so; and, my gracious! I never see such a black look on any one’s face before. He seemed to grow all dark and purple-looking, and his eyes were quite red-like. It was just like as if he’d have knocked the other man down, miss, that it was.”

“Well, I don’t think I should have thought any the worse of him if he had.”

“Oh, miss, it’s an evil face. And I’m never deceived about faces. I said, first time I saw her, that nursery-maid Mrs. Denison sent away without a character was no good. And then that under-gardener——”

“You mustn’t let your prejudices run away with you. Judge people by their actions; not their looks. Now, I saw something quite different in that gentleman’s face, and we can’t both be right. It seemed to me that he looked like a man who had had a very hard life and a great deal of trouble; as if he had done nothing but struggle, struggle with—I don’t know exactly with what; poverty, perhaps, or perhaps with a violent temper, or——”

She stopped, and stared into the fire, having ceased to remember that she was carrying on a conversation. Her wandering thoughts, however, soon took a practical turn again. “The cabman!” she cried, starting up tragically; “I never paid him.”

She was instinctively turning towards the door, haunted by an alarming sum in addition of innumerable hours at sixpence every quarter of an hour, when Lucy’s voice, in tones of great shrewdness, stopped her.

“Oh, Miss Olivia,” she said, shaking her head knowingly; “he’s gone away long ago. If this was a place where cabmen would wait for their fares for two hours without so much as knocking at the door, we might think ourselves in heaven, which the other people shows us we’re not.”

“Well, but who paid his fare, then?”

Lucy began to look not only mysterious, but rather alarmed.

“Oh, Miss Olivia, perhaps it’s a plot to get us into his power!”

They had both come to the same conclusion as to the person who paid the fare, but at this point their reflections branched off into widely different channels.

“You’re a little goose, Lucy, and you’ve been filling your head with penny novels, I can see,” said she.

But the obligation to a stranger, which she could scarcely doubt she was under, troubled her.

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