Every now and then she glanced at people who were passing; there were intervals when she wholly lost herself in reverie.

She was tired, and had even a slight headache.

When the hand of the clock pointed to half-past three, she closed the volume from which she had been copying extracts, and began to collect her papers.
A voice spoke close behind her.
'Where's your father, Miss Yule ?' The speaker was a man of sixty, short, stout, tonsured by the hand of time.

He had a broad, flabby face, the colour of an ancient turnip, save where one of the cheeks was marked with a mulberry stain; his eyes, grey-orbed in a yellow setting, glared with good-humoured inquisitiveness, and his mouth was that of the confirmed gossip.

For eyebrows he had two little patches of reddish stubble; for moustache, what looked like a bit of discoloured tow, and scraps of similar material hanging beneath his creasy chin represented a beard.