“Did you ever see him before?”
“Oh, no—no, never! I hope to God I may never see him again!”
“What was he like?”
“Come closer to me,” she says, laying hold of my hand with her small and chilly fingers; “stay quite near me, and I will tell you,”—after a pause—“he had a nose!”
“My dear soul,” cry I, bursting out with a loud laugh in the silence of the night, “do not most people have noses? Would not he have been much more dreadful if he had had none?”
“But it was such a nose!” she says, with perfect trembling gravity.
“A bottle nose?” suggest I, still cackling.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t laugh!” she says, nervously; “if you had seen his face, you would have been as little disposed to laugh as I.”
“But his nose?” return I, suppressing my merriment; “what kind of nose was it? See, I am as grave as a judge.”
“It was very prominent,” she answers, in a sort of awe-struck half-whisper, “and very sharply chiselled; the nostrils very much cut out.” A little pause. “His eyebrows were one straight black line across his face, and under them his eyes burnt like dull coals of fire, that shone and yet did not shine; they looked like dead eyes, sunken, half extinguished, and yet sinister.”