intervals favoured one another with fragmentary speech. Gideon sat
erect in his chair or stood before the fireplace, now banked with ferns;
black-clad, tall and thin and straight in the comely pleasance of his
sixty years, his face smoothly shaven, his cheekbones jutting above
depressed cheeks that fell to his narrow, pointed chin, his blue eyes
crackling far under the brow, high and narrow and shaded with ruffling
gray hair, still plenteous. His ordinary aspect was severe, almost
saturnine; but he was wont to destroy this effect with his thin-lipped
smile that broke winningly over small white teeth and surprisingly
hinted an alert young man behind these flickering shadows of age. When
he sat he sat gracefully erect; when he stood to face the other two, or
paced the length of the table, he stood straight or moved with supple
joints. He was smoking a cigar with fastidious relish, and seemed to
commune more with it than with his son or his brother. Beside Sharon
Whipple his dress seemed foppish.

Sharon, the round, stout man, two years younger than Gideon, had the
same blue eyes, but they looked from a face plump, florid, vivacious.
There was a hint of the choleric in his glance. His hair had been
lighter than Gideon's, and though now not so plentiful, had grayed less
noticeably. His fairer skin was bedizened with freckles; and when with
a blunt thumb he pushed up the outer ends of his heavy eye-brows or
cocked the thumb at a speaker whose views he did not share, it could be
seen that he was the most aggressive of the three men. Sharon
notoriously lost his temper. Gideon had never been known to lose his.
Sharon smoked and lolled carelessly in a Morris chair, one short, stout
arm laid along its side, the other carelessly wielding the cigar,
heedless of falling ashes. Beside the careful Gideon he looked rustic.

Harvey D., son of Gideon, worriedly paced the length of the room. His
eyes were large behind thick glasses. He smoked a cigarette gingerly,
not inhaling its smoke, but ridding himself of it in little puffs of
distaste. His brown beard was neatly trimmed, and above it shone his
forehead, pale and beautifully modelled under the carefully parted,
already thinning, hair that was arranged in something almost like
ringlets on either side. He was neat-faced. Of the three men he carried
the Whipple nose most gracefully. His figure was slight, not so tall as
his father's, and he was garbed in a more dapper fashion. He wore