deux mains_ and waited. In a few minutes Mary opened the door, and
announced Dr. Van Helsing.
I rose and bowed, and he came towards me; a man of medium weight,
strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest and
a neck well balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The poise
of the head strikes one at once as indicative of thought and power; the
head is noble, well-sized, broad, and large behind the ears. The face,
clean-shaven, shows a hard, square chin, a large, resolute, mobile
mouth, a good-sized nose, rather straight, but with quick, sensitive
nostrils, that seem to broaden as the big, bushy brows come down and the
mouth tightens. The forehead is broad and fine, rising at first almost
straight and then sloping back above two bumps or ridges wide apart;
such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot possibly tumble over it,
but falls naturally back and to the sides. Big, dark blue eyes are set
widely apart, and are quick and tender or stern with the man s moods. He
said to me:--
Mrs. Harker, is it not? I bowed assent.
That was Miss Mina Murray? Again I assented.
It is Mina Murray that I came to see that was friend of that poor dear
child Lucy Westenra. Madam Mina, it is on account of the dead I come.
Sir, I said, you could have no better claim on me than that you were
a friend and helper of Lucy Westenra. And I held out my hand. He took
it and said tenderly:--
Oh, Madam Mina, I knew that the friend of that poor lily girl must be
good, but I had yet to learn---- He finished his speech with a courtly
bow. I asked him what it was that he wanted to see me about, so he at
once began:--
I have read your letters to Miss Lucy. Forgive me, but I had to begin
to inquire somewhere, and there was none to ask. I know that you were
with her at Whitby. She sometimes kept a diary--you need not look
surprised, Madam Mina; it was begun after you had left, and was in
imitation of you--and in that diary she traces by inference certain
things to a sleep-walking in which she puts down that you saved her. In
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