He was a big stoop-shouldered Englishman with a pale, pasty face
beginning to sag at the jowls. There was a queer immobility
about the features as though the man were always in some fear.
His eyes were a pale tallow color and seemed too small for their
immense sockets. One could see that the man had been a
gentleman. I write it in the past, because at the moment I felt
it as in the past. I felt that something had dispossessed him.
"This will be Robin," he said. "My dear fellow, it was fine of
you to travel all this way to see me."
He had a nervous cold hand with hardly any pressure in the grasp
of it. His thin black hair was brushed across the top of his
bald head, and the distended, apprehensive expression on his face
did not change.
He made me sit down by the fire and asked me about the family in
America. But there was, I thought, no real interest in this
interrogation until he came to a reflective comment.
"I should like to go to America," he said; "there must be great
wastes of country where one would be out of the world."
The sincerity of this expression stood out in the trivial talk.
It indicated something that disturbed the man.
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