genially, a little coarsely--every time he
met it. A contemptuous tolerance for people who were not getting on was
spreading beneath its surface; it left each time a deeper feeling that
its owner could never be in the wrong.

"I hope you're well, sir," he resumed: "most important for you to have
your health now you're going-to"--and, feeling for the delicate way to
put it, he involuntarily winked--"to become a family man. We saw it
in the paper. My wife said to me the other morning at breakfast: 'Bob,
here's a Mr. Richard Paramor Shelton goin' to be married. Is that any
relative of your Mr. Shelton?' 'My dear,' I said to her, 'it's the very
man!'"

It disquieted Shelton to perceive that his old friend did not pass the
whole of his life at that table writing in the centre of the room, but
that somewhere (vistas of little grey houses rose before his eyes) he
actually lived another life where someone called him "Bob." Bob! And
this, too, was a revelation. Bob! Why, of course, it was the only name
for him! A bell rang.

"That's your uncle"; and again the head clerk's voice sounded ironical.
"Good-bye, sir."

He seemed to clip off intercourse as one clips off electric light.
Shelton left him writing, and preceded the red-haired boy to an enormous
room in the front where his uncle waited.

Edmund Paramor was a medium-sized and upright man of seventy, whose
brown face was perfectly clean-shaven. His grey, silky hair was brushed
in a cock's comb from his fine forehead, bald on the left side. He
stood before the hearth facing the room, and his figure had the springy
abruptness of men who cannot fatten. There was a certain youthfulness,
too, in his eyes, yet they had a look as though he had been through
fire; and his mouth curled at the corners in surprising smiles. The room
was like the man--morally large, void of red-tape and almost void
of furniture; no tin boxes were ranged against the walls, no papers
littered up the table; a single bookcase contained a complete edition of
the law reports, and resting on the Law Directory was a single red rose
in a glass of water. It looked the room of one with a sober magnanimity,
who went to the heart of things, despised haggling, and before whose
smiles the more immediate kinds of humbug faded.

"Well, Dick," said he, "how's your mother?"

Shelton replied that his mother was all right.

"Tell her that I'm going to sell her Easterns after all, and put into
this Brass thing. You c