or the shell was coming their way. At night the burning fuse
could be seen like a rocket in the air; so long as it span and flew,
the card-players were safe, but the moment it became stationary above
their heads it was time to run, for the shell was falling upon them.
The guns of the Malakoff were not the rifled guns of a later decade.
When the Major had finished, the General again looked at the clock,
and Geoffrey said good-night.

He stood outside the door listening to the muffled talk on the other
side of the panels, and, with a shiver, lighted his candle, and held it
aloft in the dark and silent hall. There was not one man's portrait upon
the walls which did not glow with the colours of a uniform,--and there
were the portraits of many men. Father and son the Faversham's had been
soldiers from the very birth of the family. Father and son,--no
steinkirks and plumed hats, no shakos and swallow tails, no frogged
coats and no high stocks. They looked down upon the boy as though
summoning him to the like service. No distinction in uniform could
obscure their resemblance to each other: that stood out with a
remarkable clearness. The Favershams were men of one stamp,--lean-faced,
hard as iron--they lacked the elasticity of steel--, rugged in feature;
confident in expression, men with firm, level mouths but rather narrow
at the forehead, men of resolution and courage, no doubt; but hardly
conspicuous for intellect, men without nerves or subtlety, fighting-men
of the first-class, but hardly first-class soldiers. Some of their
faces, indeed, revealed an actual stupidity. The boy, however, saw none
of their defects. To him they were one and all portentous and terrible;
and he had an air of one standing before his judges and pleading mutely
for forgiveness. The candle shook in his hand.

These Crimean knights, as his father termed them, were the worst of
torturers to Geoffrey Faversham. He sat horribly thralled, so long as
he was allowed; he crept afterwards to bed and lay there shuddering.
For his mother, a lady who some twenty years before had shone at the
Court of Saxe-Coburg, as much by the refinement of her intellect as by
the beauty of her person, had bequeathed to him a very burdensome
gift of imagination. It was visible in his face, marking him off
unmistakably from his father, and from the study portraits in the
hall. He had the capacity to foresee possibilities, and he could not
but exercise that capacity. A hint was