smoke while I run in and see
them. They'll stay only a minute."

"Nonsense, child! I can't lose sight of you so soon again. We can smoke
in there as well."

"Coffee in the library, Harris." She gave the order with a submissive
shrug and led the way out.

Ewing saw two men come to greet her, alike enough of feature to reveal
their relationship at first glance. He detected, however, a curious
contrast they presented. The father, slight and short of stature, was a
very young-looking old man, while the son was an old-looking young man.
The father was dapper, effusive, sprightly, quick with smiling gestures;
the son restrained, deliberate, low-toned with a slow, half-cynical
smile of waiting. He gave the effect of subduing what his father almost
elfishly expressed.

Father and son greeted the men over the shoulders of Mrs. Laithe, and
Ewing was presented. There was an inclination of the son's head, and a
careless glance of his waiting eyes; from the father, a jerky, absent
"How-d'you do--How-d'you do!"

They moved by chatting stages to the library. The elder Teevan,
carefully pointing the ends of his small, dark mustache, stood with his
back to the dying fire, a coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the
other, twittering gallantly of a town's desolation wrought by the going
away of Mrs. Laithe; and of a town renewed by her great-hearted return.
"A preciously timed relenting," he called it, with a challenging sigh
toward the lady, as he gracefully flicked back a ringlet of the lustrous
brown hair that had fallen low on his brow. Ewing thought it wonderful
hair on a man whose face, though ruddy in hue, showed signs of age.
There were deep lines at the corners of those gallantly flashing eyes,
and their under lids drooped. The skin was shrunk tightly over the high,
thin nose, the cheeks were less than plump, and the neck revealed some
unhappy wrinkles. Sadly, too, his voice failed at supreme moments. It
was tragic, Ewing thought, to listen to a sentence valiantly begun, only
to hear the voice crack on a crucial word.

Mrs. Laithe received the little man's tribute with a practiced
indifference, chatting absently, meanwhile, with the son. Presently she
led Ewing and the younger Teevan to the drawing room to admire a huge
jar of roses for which she thanked Teevan.

Back in the library Piersoll was listening to a salmon-fishing story of
Bartell's. The elder Teevan genially overlooked the scene, humming
lightly to himself