"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.
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