It was a sultry evening. The scent of the flowers coming in through the open window was almost putting her to sleep. Under drowsy eyelids she watched the curtain swaying gently in the breeze when a sudden step outside made her straighten herself.
“The postman!” she ejaculated, “bless him—he has saved me from going to sleep.”
But it was not the postman. There was a pause, then the footsteps came nearer the window, and she saw standing between the curtains an uninteresting-looking man whom she barely noticed until compelled to do so by his fixed scrutiny of her.
Then she examined him. He was neither tall nor short. He had a quiet, tired face, a slight sneer and sloping shoulders,—becoming in a woman, but an evidence of weak-mindedness in a man. He was evidently interested in her in spite of his bored manner. She was not flattered, however, and said, coolly: “You will find a footman at the hall door.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said, in a full, smooth tone and removing his hat, “but it is you I wish to see.”
“Oh, indeed!” she said, in surprise; then she asked, hesitatingly, “Will you come in?”
He murmured, “I thank you,” entered the room, grasped a chair, and in an absent-minded way drew it nearer her, and sat down, without having once interrupted his scrutiny of her face.
Finally he muttered to himself in quiet satisfaction: “She will do—might even create a sensation.”
The beginning of his scrutiny found Nina a happy, contented, though slightly embarrassed young person; the end of it left her a creature panic-stricken and consumed with apprehensive fear.
The man before her was mad. Only that morning Lady Forrest had been telling her that in the very next house lived a rich, middle-aged merchant whose reason was affected, but so slightly that it was not considered necessary to put him under restraint. Now he had escaped from the surveillance of his relatives, and had come to torment her, and in all the wide earth he could not have found a person with a more strongly rooted, morbid aversion to mad people than she had.