screwed mouth, mooched along the platform to his 
grub, which he would find in an isolated cottage some 
three hundred yards away. 
In strong contrast to the Englishman, with his mous-
tache afforesting a whitish face, marked with deep red 
rings on neck and forehead, his impending paunchiness 
and his full suit of armour, was the small, active man 
with the pointed beard whom fate had thrown first into 
the same compartment, and then into the same hour of 
exile from all their fellows. 
His eyes were astonishingly black and fierce; his 
beard was grizzled and his face heavily lined and obvi-
ously burnt by tropical suns; but that face also ex-
pressed intelligence, strength, and resourcefulness in a 
degree which would have made him an ideal comrade in 
a forlorn hope, or the defence of a desperate vil-
lage.  Across the back of his left hand was a thick and 
heavy scar.  In spite of all this, he was dressed with sin-
gular neatness and correctness; which circumstance, 
although his English was purer than that of his compan-
ion in distress, made the latter secretly incline to suspect 
him of being a Frenchman.  In spite of the quietness of 
his dress and the self-possession of his demeanour, the 
sombre glitter of those black eyes, pin-points below 
shaggy eye-brows, inspired the large man with a certain 
uneasiness.  Not at all a chap to quarrel with, was his 
thought.  However, being himself a widely-travelled 
man—Boulogne, Dieppe, Paris, Switzerland, and even 
Venice—he had none of that insularity of which foreign-
ers accuse some Englishmen, and he had endeavoured 
to make conversation during the journey.  The small 
man had proved a poor companion, taciturn to a fault, 
sparing of words where a nod would satisfy the obliga-
tions of courtesy, and seemingly fonder of his pipe than 
of his fellow-man.  A man with a secret, thought the 
Englishman. 
The train had jolted out of the station and the porter 
had faded from the landscape.  “A deserted spot,” re-
marked the Englishman, whose name was Bevan, “espe-