The question was a natural one, and the voice not unpleasant, yet I started, having noticed no one near me.
"I beg your pardon," said the owner of the voice. "Nervous, I fear!"
"No, not at all, only my thoughts were wandering. I beg your pardon--I do not know whether the place is to let or not."
"A good house?" This might have been interrogative, or uttered as an assertion, but I took it as the former, and answered accordingly.
"Yes, a good house--a very good house, indeed," I said.
"It is often vacant, though," he said, with a light laugh.
"Through no fault of the house," I added.
"Oh! it is the fault of the tenants, is it?" he remarked, laughing once more. "The owners, I should think, must be rather tired of their property by this time."
"I do not know that," I replied. "They live in hope of finding a good and sensible tenant willing to take it."
"And equally willing to keep it, eh?" he remarked. "Well, I, perhaps, am not much of a judge in the matter, but I should say they will have to wait a long time first."
"You know something about the house?" I said, interrogatively.
"Yes," he answered, "most people about here do, I fancy--but least said soonest mended"; and as by this time we had reached the top of the lane, he bade me a civil good-evening, and struck off in a westerly direction.
Though the light of the setting sun shone full in my face, and I had to shade my eyes in order to enable me to see at all, moved by some feeling impossible to analyse, I stood watching that retreating figure. Afterwards I could have sworn to the man among ten thousand.
A man of about fifty, well and plainly dressed, who did not appear to be in ill-health, yet whose complexion had a blanched look, like forced sea-kale; a man of under, rather than over middle height, not of slight make, but lean as if the flesh had been all worn off his bones; a man with sad, anxious, outlooking, abstracted eyes, with a nose slightly hooked, without a trace of whisker, with hair thin and straight and flaked with white, active and lithe in his movements, a swift walker, though he had a slight halt. While looking at him thrown up in relief against the glowing western sky, I noticed, what had previously escaped my attention, that he was a little deformed. His right shoulder was rather higher than the other. A man with a story in his memory, I imagined; a man who had been jilted by the girl he loved, or who had lost her by death, or whose wife had proved faithless; whose life, at all events, had been marred by a great trouble. So, in my folly, I decided; for I was young then, and romantic, and had experienced some sorrow myself connected with pecuniary matters.
