ph.

CHAPTER III: Breakfast

At about eight o'clock in the morning of the following day Mr. Nathaniel
Burton Cupples stood on the veranda of the hotel at Marlstone. He was
thinking about breakfast. In his case the colloquialism must be taken
literally: he really was thinking about breakfast, as he thought about
every conscious act of his life when time allowed deliberation.
He reflected that on the preceding day the excitement and activity
following upon the discovery of the dead man had disorganized his
appetite, and led to his taking considerably less nourishment than
usual. This morning he was very hungry, having already been up and about
for an hour; and he decided to allow himself a third piece of toast and
an additional egg; the rest as usual. The remaining deficit must be made
up at luncheon, but that could be gone into later.

So much being determined, Mr. Cupples applied himself to the enjoyment
of the view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With a
connoisseur's eye he explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a
great pierced rock rose from a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness of
the vast tilted levels of pasture and tillage and woodland that sloped
gently up from the cliffs toward the distant moor. Mr. Cupples delighted
in landscape.

He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old,
by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his
age. A sparse and straggling beard and moustache did not conceal a thin
but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and
narrow jaw gave him very much of a clerical air, and this impression
was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. The
whole effect of him, indeed, was priestly. He was a man of unusually
conscientious, industrious, and orderly mind, with little imagination.
His father's household had been used to recruit its domestic
establishment by means of advertisements in which it was truthfully
described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he had
escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an inexhaustible
kindness of heart, and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed nothing
to humour. In an earlier day and with a clerical training he might have
risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded member
of the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a widower without
children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely amo