The peculiarity of this ‘chaff’ was that it was uttered in a simple and serious tone, in which not the faintest tinge of ironical intent was apparent.  The other artist looked across and said:  ’Dear me!  Sinfi Lovell!  I am pleased to see you, Sinfi.  I will ask you for a sitting to-morrow.  A study of your head would be very suggestive among the Welsh hills.’

The man who had been ‘chaffing’ Sinfi then rose and walked towards his Quaker-like companion, and I had an opportunity of observing him fully.  I saw that he was a spare man, wearing a brown velvet coat and a dark felt hat.  The collar of the coat seemed to have been made carefully larger than usual, in order to increase the apparent width of his chest.  His hair was brown and curly, but close cut.  His features were regular, perhaps handsome.  His complexion was bright,—­fair almost,—­rosy in hue, and his eyes were brown.

He shook hands with Sinfi as he passed us, and gave me a glance of that rapid and all-comprehending kind which seems to take in, at once, a picture in its every detail.

‘What do you think of him?’ said Sinfi to me, as he passed on and we two sat down on the grass by the side of the stream.

‘I am puzzled,’ I replied, ’to know whether he is a young man who looks like a middle-aged one, or a middle-aged man who looks like a young one.  How’s his hair under the hat?’

‘Thinnish atop,’ said Sinfi laconically.  ‘And I’m puzzled,’ I added, still looking at him as he walked over the grass, ’as to whether he’s a little man who looks middle-sized, or a middle-sized man who looks little.’

’He’s a little big ‘un,’ said Sinfi; ‘about the height o’ Rhona Bozzell’s Tarno Rye.’

‘Altogether he puzzles me, Sinfi!’

‘He puzzled me same way at fust.’

What was it that made me take an interest so strange, strong, and sudden in this man?  Without a hint of hair upon his face, while juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wide-awake, he had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the little crow’s-feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately as being probably on the verge of thirty-five.  His figure was slim and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall.  I should have considered him small had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and sonorous voice with which he had accosted Sinfi conveyed an impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often produce.  This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek which we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of sedateness such as I should have expected to find (and did not find) in the other man—­the man of the shaven cheek and Quaker costume; but, in the one glance I had got from those watchful, sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable.