"It's off already," remarked Mary, taking the parcels from him. "I suppose you lost it on the road. Give me those."
She saw him plainly now as he stood with little rivulets of water running off him on to the floor. His clothes clung to a slim, drenched figure that was not so tall as Mary's. Thin wrists above nervous, delicate hands protruded from a jacket whose sleeves were too short. David was small, but his neck, wrists and ankles always seemed to be straining out of his clothes, so eager were they to get on with this tremendous task of reforming the world. His face was a pallid grey tinged with purple, because he was very cold and still felt rather sick and more than a little tired. His eyes were grey too, not very large, but amazingly alive for all their weariness, and his thin lips had a humorous twist, half gay and half pathetic, that went straight to Mary's heart.
At present he was the colour of mud all over except his hair. The only peculiarity which David could ever share with Samson was that the secret of his personality lay in his hair, for David's was wild and wiry, the colour of very old wet bricks. It started up everywhere over his head, declaring brazenly to the world its owner's intention of going everywhere and seeing everything and smashing up heaven and earth in an hour to build new ones next day.
Before Mary had completed her inspection, heavy footsteps clumped along the passage, and David saw a tall bearded man standing by the doorway. He was not very like Mary, but David decided he must be her father.
"Oh, John," said Mary, "this is Mr. David Rossitur. And he is very wet. Can I have some of your clothes for him? Mr. Rossitur, this is my husband."
An hour later David, who had completely abandoned all former notions of correct behaviour in a strange house, lay back against the pillows of an enormous bed in a candlelit room, while Mary sat beside him and rubbed his chest with Elliman's Embrocation. It was the biggest bed he had ever seen, and John's pyjamas in which he was enveloped were the biggest pyjamas he had ever seen. But the meal of hot whisky and tea and fish and cheese-cakes, which he had just eaten, was the queerest he had ever tasted, the interview between the shepherd and his mistress the strangest he had ever heard, so nothing, he felt, could really surprise him now.
He surrendered himself with resignation to the firm hand of Mary.
"You're going to have a shocking cold, Mr. Rossitur," she remarked severely. "I simply can't imagine why anyone in their senses allowed you to wander loose in the country at this time of year. Where do you live when you're not losing yourself in Yorkshire?"
David, speaking as distinctly as he could while Mary's energetic hand paraded between his collar bones, replied that he did not exactly live anywhere. He'd given up his digs in Manchester because the landlady underpaid her maid and he refused to countenance sweated labour. A fine comment on the same refusal was lost in a shudder as a cold stream of embrocation trickled gleefully down his arm-pit.
"Keep still. It isn't cold really. I warmed the bottle. You don't look as if you came from Manchester. People there are usually rather sensible. Don't wriggle so!"