e gate, I checked the question which
instinctively rose to my lips and with a simple bow,--responded to by a
more or less familiar nod from either,--accepted the situation with all
the _sang-froid_ the occasion seemed to demand. Perhaps this was wise,
perhaps it was not; there was little opportunity to judge, for the start
they both gave as they encountered the eyes of the picture before
mentioned drew my attention to a consideration of the different ways in
which men, however similar in other respects, express sudden and
unlooked-for emotion. The big man simply allowed his astonishment,
dread, or whatever the feeling was which moved him, to ooze forth in a
cold and deathly perspiration which robbed his cheeks of color and cast
a bluish shadow over his narrow and retreating temples; while the thin
and waspish man, caught in the same trap (for trap I saw it was),
shouted aloud in his ill-timed mirth, the false and cruel character of
which would have made me shudder, if all expression of feeling on my
part had not been held in check by the interest I immediately
experienced in the display of open bravado with which, in another
moment, these two tried to carry off their mutual embarrassment.

"Good likeness, eh?" laughed the seamy-faced man. "Quite an idea, that!
Makes him one of us again! Well, he's welcome--in oils. Can't say much
to us from canvas, eh?" And the rafters above him vibrated, as his
violent efforts at joviality went up in loud and louder assertion from
his thin throat.

A nudge from the other's elbow stopped him and I saw them both cast
half-lowering, half-inquisitive glances in my direction.

"One of the Witherspoon boys?" queried one.

"Perhaps," snarled the other. "I never saw but one of them. There are
five, aren't there? Eustace believed in marrying off his gals young."

"Damn him, yes. And he'd have married them off younger if he had known
how numbers were going to count some day among the Westonhaughs." And
he laughed again in a way I should certainly have felt it my business to
resent, if my indignation as well as the ill-timed allusions which had
called it forth had not been put to an end by a fresh arrival through
the veiling mist which hung like a shroud at the doorway.

This time it was for me to experience a shock of something like fear.
Yet the personage who called up this unlooked-for sensation in my
naturally hardy nature was old and, to all appearance, harmless from
disability, if not