Tadman, aghast with
wonder; for visitors at Wyncomb were of the rarest, and an unknown
visitor above all things marvellous.

Mr. Whitelaw opened the house-door, which opened straight into a little
lobby between the two parlours. There was a larger door and a spacious
stone entrance-hall at one end of the house; but that door had not been
opened within the memory of man, and the hall was only used as a
storehouse now-a-days. There was some little mumbling talk in the lobby
before the two men came in, and then Mrs. Tadman's curiosity was relieved
by a closer view of the stranger.

Yes, he was certainly handsome, remarkably handsome even, for a man whose
youth was past; but there was something in his face, a something sinister
and secret, as it were, which did not strike Mrs. Tadman favourably. She
could not by any means have explained the nature of her sensations on
looking at him, but, as she said afterwards, she felt all in a moment
that he was there for no good. And yet he was very civil-spoken too, and
addressed both the ladies in a most conciliating tone, and with a kind of
florid politeness.

Ellen looked at him, interested for the moment in spite of her apathetic
indifference to all things. The advent of a stranger was something so
rare as to awaken a faint interest in the mind most dead to impressions.
She did not like his manner; there was something false and hollow in his
extreme politeness. And his face--what was it in his face that startled
her with such a sudden sense of strangeness and yet of familiarity?

Had she ever seen him before? Yes; surely that was the impression which
sent such a sudden shook through her nerves, which startled her from her
indifference into eager wonder and perplexity. Where had she seen him
before? Where and when? Long ago, or only very lately? She could not
tell. Yet it seemed to her that she had looked at eyes like those, not
once, but many times in her life. And yet the man was utterly strange to
her. That she could have seen him before appeared impossible. It must
have been some one like him she had seen, then. Yes, that was it. It was
the shadow of another face in his that had startled her with so strange a
feeling, almost as if she had been looking upon some ghostly thing.
Another face, like and yet unlike.

But what face? whose face?

She could not answer that question, and her inability to solve the enigma
tormented her all tea-time, as the stranger sat opposite to h