And then Mrs.De Peyster saw one of the oddest changes in a man's face imaginable.

Mr.Pyecroft's eyes, which had been large with benedictory roundness, flashed with a smile.

And then, at an instant's end, his face was once more grave and clerically benign.
But that instant-long look made her shiver.

What was in this clergyman's mind?
She watched him, in spite of herself--strangely fascinated; stole looks at him during this meal, and the next, and when they passed upon the stairway.

He had a confusingly contradictory face, had the Reverend Herbert E.Pyecroft--for such she learned was his full name; a face customarily sedate and elderish, and then, almost without perceptible change, for swift moments oddly youthful; with a wide mouth, which would suddenly twist up at its right corner as though from some unholy quip of humor, and whose as sudden straightening into a solemn line would show that the unseemly humor had been exorcised.