For suddenly there rose up before her a figure so strange that for a moment she felt almost like a scared child.
It sprang from the bushes and stood facing her like an animal at bay--a short creature neither man nor boy, misshapen, grotesquely humped, possessing long thin arms of almost baboon-like proportions.

The head was sunken into the shoulders.

It was flung back and the face upraised--and it was the face that made her pause, for it was the most pathetic sight she had ever looked upon.

It was the face of a lad of two or three and twenty, but drawn in lines so painful, so hollowed, so piteous, that fear melted into compassion at the sight.

The dark eyes that stared upwards had a frightened look mingled with a certain defiance.