A dark man, with the ridge of the cheek-bone well defined under the slightly hollow temple.

A complete stranger.

Not a customer either.
Mrs Verloc looked at him placidly.
"You came over from the Continent ?" she said after a time.
The long, thin stranger, without exactly looking at Mrs Verloc, answered only by a faint and peculiar smile.
Mrs Verloc's steady, incurious gaze rested on him.
"You understand English, don't you ?" "Oh yes.

I understand English." There was nothing foreign in his accent, except that he seemed in his slow enunciation to be taking pains with it.

And Mrs Verloc, in her varied experience, had come to the conclusion that some foreigners could speak better English than the natives.