His neighbour at the other grave had withdrawn, as he himself, with
force enough in him, would have done by now, and was advancing
along the path on his way to one of the gates. This brought him
close, and his pace, was slow, so that--and all the more as there
was a kind of hunger in his look--the two men were for a minute
directly confronted. Marcher knew him at once for one of the
deeply stricken--a perception so sharp that nothing else in the
picture comparatively lived, neither his dress, his age, nor his
presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep ravage
of the features that he showed. He SHOWED them--that was the
point; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that was either
a signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to an opposed
sorrow. He might already have been aware of our friend, might at
some previous hour have noticed in him the smooth habit of the
scene, with which the state of his own senses so scantly consorted,
and might thereby have been stirred as by an overt discord. What
Marcher was at all events conscious of was in the first place that
the image of scarred passion presented to him was conscious too--of
something that profaned the air; and in the second that, roused,
startled, shocked, he was yet the next moment looking after it, as
it went, with envy.
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