A Fair Fraud — page 68: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Fair Fraud 57 water. Through these woods a number of winding paths had been cut, and Marion, who knew every turn and corner of them intimately, took the widest opening to the right of her, and was soon hidden amongst the thick under- growth of laurels and holly which filled up the spaces between the moss-grown stems of the trees. She had not gone far when she heard voices ahead, and presently a turn of the path brought her within sight of the backs of two persons who were walking slowly on in front of her, going in the same direction as herself. One of these persons was Mrs Lane—the other, to Marion’s extreme surprise, was a complete stranger. He was rather a tall man, dressed in a loose and exceedingly shabby brown overcoat, the collar of which was well pulled up to his ears, and he wore a soft brown felt hat, also in the last stages of shabbiness and decrepitude. He looked, in fact, rather like one of the tramps whom Marion had sometimes encountered with some apprehension begging along the high road. She would have believed this man to be a tramp were it not that he was walking quite closely and familiarly by his companion’s side, that he appeared to be talking to her earnestly, and that she evinced no repulsion to his presence and no desire to get away from him. ElOOO©