is working
nothing but Orions."

"But fortunately there is but one star of my name," observed he. "Pray
tell her that Dame Susa."

The child clapped her hands. "He does not choose to have any other star
near him!" she exclaimed.

The widow broke in: "Little simpleton! I know people who cannot even
bear to have a likeness traced between themselves and any one else.--But
this you must permit, Orion--you were quite right just now, Neforis; his
mouth and brow might have been taken from his father's face."

The remark was quite accurate; and yet it would have been hard to
imagine two men more unlike than the bright youth full of vitality, and
the languid old man on the couch, to whom even the small exertion of
moving the men was an effort. The Mukaukas might once have been like his
son, but in some long past time. Thin grey locks now only covered one
half of his bald head, and of his eyes, which, thirty years since, had
sparkled perhaps as keenly as Orion's, there was usually nothing, or
very little to be seen; for the heavy lids always drooped over them as
though they had lost the power to open, and this gave his handsome but
deathly-pale face a somewhat owl-like look. It was not morose, however;
on the contrary the mingled lines of suffering and of benevolent
kindliness resulted in an expression only of melancholy. The mouth
and flabby cheeks were as motionless as though they were dead. Grief,
anxiety and alarms seemed to have passed over them with a paralysing
hand and had left their trace there. He looked like a man weary unto
death, and still living only because fate had denied him the grace to
die. Indeed, he had often been taken for dead by his family when he had
dipped too freely into a certain little blood-stone box to take too many
of the white opium-pills, one of which he placed between his colorless
lips at long intervals, even during his game of draughts.

He lifted each piece slowly, like a sleeper with his eyes half shut; and
yet his opponent could not hold her own against his wary tactics and was
defeated by him now for the third time, though her uncle himself called
her a good player. It was easy to read in her high, smooth brow and
dark-blue eyes with their direct gaze, that she could think clearly
and decisively, and also feel deeply. But she seemed wilful too, and
contradictory--at any rate to-day; for when Orion pointed out some move
to her she rarely took his advice, but with set lips, pushed the