age. He was a little nearsighted, and at first he did not see the
cause of the commotion. Then:

"I suppose I'm trespassing," said a husky voice, and a man stepped out
toward him.

The stranger carried himself with a certain jauntiness, and he had need
of what assistance artifice could lend him, for he was singularly
unprepossessing. He was a man who might as well have been sixty as
fifty. His clothes soiled, torn and greasy, were of good cut. The shirt
was filthy, but it was attached to a frayed collar, and the crumpled
cravat was ornamented with a cameo pin.

But it was the face which attracted Kitson's attention. There was
something inherently evil in that puffed face, in the dull eyes that
blinked under the thick black eyebrows. The lips, full and loose, parted
in a smile as the lawyer stepped back to avoid contact with the
unsavoury visitor.

"I suppose I'm trespassing--good gad! Me trespassing--funny, very
funny!" He indulged in a hoarse wheezy laugh and broke suddenly into a
torrent of the foulest language that this hardened lawyer had ever
heard.

"Pardon, pardon," he said, stopping as suddenly. "Man of the world, eh?
You'll understand that when a gentleman has grievances...." He fumbled
in his waistcoat-pocket and found a black-rimmed monocle and inserted it
in his eye. There was an obscenity in the appearance of this foul wreck
of a man which made the lawyer feel physically sick.

"Trespassing, by gad!" He went back to his first conceit and his voice
rasped with malignity. "Gad! If I had my way with people! I'd slit their
throats, I would, sir. I'd stick pins in their eyes--red-hot pins. I'd
boil them alive----"

Hitherto the lawyer had not spoken, but now his repulsion got the better
of his usually equable temper.

"What are you doing here?" he asked sternly. "You're on private
property--take your beastliness elsewhere."

The man glared at him and laughed.

"Trespassing!" he sneered. "Trespassing! Very good--your servant, sir!"

He swept his derby hat from his head (the lawyer saw that he was bald),
and turning, strutted back through the plantation the way he had come.
It was not the way out and Kitson was half-inclined to follow and see
the man off the estate. Then he remembered the urgency of his errand
and continued his journey to the village. On his way back he looked
about, but there was no trace of the unpleasant intruder. Who was he? he
wondered. Some broken derelict with nothing but the