Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Ball and the Cross by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
page 272 of 309 (88%)
and as he passed Turnbull the latter was aroused by a strong
impression of having seen the man somewhere before. It was no one
that he knew well, yet he was certain that it was someone at
whom he had at sometime or other looked steadily. It was neither
the face of a friend nor of an enemy; it aroused neither
irritation nor tenderness, yet it was a face which had for some
reason been of great importance in his life. Turning and
returning, and making detours about the garden, he managed to
study the man's face again and again--a moustached, somewhat
military face with a monocle, the sort of face that is
aristocratic without being distinguished. Turnbull could not
remember any particular doctors in his decidedly healthy
existence. Was the man a long-lost uncle, or was he only somebody
who had sat opposite him regularly in a railway train? At that
moment the man knocked down his own eye-glass with a gesture of
annoyance; Turnbull remembered the gesture, and the truth sprang
up solid in front of him. The man with the moustaches was
Cumberland Vane, the London police magistrate before whom he and
MacIan had once stood on their trial. The magistrate must have
been transferred to some other official duties--to something
connected with the inspection of asylums.

Turnbull's heart gave a leap of excitement which was half hope.
As a magistrate Mr. Cumberland Vane had been somewhat careless
and shallow, but certainly kindly, and not inaccessible to common
sense so long as it was put to him in strictly conventional
language. He was at least an authority of a more human and
refreshing sort than the crank with the wagging beard or the
fiend with the forked chin.

DigitalOcean Referral Badge