nextian:

One of the maids burst in and cried out, “Oh, madam! The master is here!”

Someone came into the room.

He was a thinner, browner person than she remembered. his hair had more grey in it and there was a whitish scar above his left eyebrow. The scar was not recent, but she had never seen it before. His features were what they had always been, but somehow his air was different. This scarcely seemed to be the person she had been thinking of only a moment ago. But before she could be disappointed, or awkward, or any of the things she had feared she would be when he at last came home, he looked around the room with a quick, half-ironic glance that she knew in an instant. Then he looked at her with the most familiar smile in the world and said, “I’m home.”

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, p 362.