und a basin. "That girl!" she said.
"There! I clean forgot it. It's her being so long!" And while she
herself finished mixing the mustard, she gave Millie a few verbal
stabs for her excessive slowness. She had cooked the ham and eggs,
laid the table, and done everything, while Millie (help indeed!) had
only succeeded in delaying the mustard. And him a new guest and
wanting to stay! Then she filled the mustard pot, and, putting it
with a certain stateliness upon a gold and black tea-tray, carried
it into the parlour.

She rapped and entered promptly. As she did so her visitor moved
quickly, so that she got but a glimpse of a white object disappearing
behind the table. It would seem he was picking something from the
floor. She rapped down the mustard pot on the table, and then she
noticed the overcoat and hat had been taken off and put over a chair
in front of the fire, and a pair of wet boots threatened rust to her
steel fender. She went to these things resolutely. "I suppose I may
have them to dry now," she said in a voice that brooked no denial.

"Leave the hat," said her visitor, in a muffled voice, and turning
she saw he had raised his head and was sitting and looking at her.

For a moment she stood gaping at him, too surprised to speak.

He held a white cloth--it was a serviette he had brought with
him--over the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws
were completely hidden, and that was the reason of his muffled
voice. But it was not that which startled Mrs. Hall. It was the fact
that all his forehead above his blue glasses was covered by a white
bandage, and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of
his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose. It was bright,
pink, and shiny just as it had been at first. He wore a dark-brown
velvet jacket with a high, black, linen-lined collar turned up about
his neck. The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and
between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns,
giving him the strangest appearance conceivable. This muffled and
bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated, that for a
moment she was rigid.

He did not remove the serviette, but remained holding it, as she
saw now, with a brown gloved hand, and regarding her with his
inscrutable blue glasses. "Leave the hat," he said, speaking very
distinctly through the white cloth.

Her nerves began to recover from the shock they had received. She
placed the hat