lands. At the sight of him, Aunt Cassie made every sign of an attempt to escape quickly, but Sabine said in a voice ominous with sweetness, "You must meet Mr. O'Hara. I think you've never met him. He's a charming man." And she placed herself in such a position that it was impossible for the old woman to escape without losing every vestige of dignity.
Then Sabine called gently, "Come in, Mr. O'Hara. . . . Mrs. Struthers is here and wants so much to meet her new neighbor."
The door opened and O'Hara stepped in, a swarthy, rather solidly built man of perhaps thirty-five, with a shapely head on which the vigorous black hair was cropped close, and with blue eyes that betrayed his Irish origin by the half-hidden sparkle of amusement at this move of Sabine's. He had a strong jaw and full, rather sensual, lips and a curious sense of great physical strength, as if all his clothes were with difficulty modeled to the muscles that lay underneath. He wore no hat, and his skin was a dark tan, touched at the cheek-bones by the dull flush of health and good blood.
He was, one would have said at first sight, a common, vulgar man in that narrow-jawed world about Durham, a man, perhaps, who had come by his muscles as a dock-laborer. Sabine had thought him vulgar in the beginning, only to succumb in the end to a crude sort of power which placed him above the realm of such distinctions. And she was a shrewd woman, too, devoted passionately to the business of getting at the essence of people; she knew that vulgarity had nothing to do with a man who had eyes so shrewd and full of mockery.
He came forward quietly and with a charming air of deference in which there was a faint suspicion of nonsense, a curious shadow of vulgarity, only one could not be certain whether he was not being vulgar by deliberation.
