s, his attention was directed to possible things, or impossible
things, left unsaid. For a second or two he was aware of an odd
suspicion, but he brushed it away as absurd, in view of the
self-assurance with which Guion roused himself at last to enter into the
conversation, which began immediately to turn on persons of whom
Davenant had no knowledge.

The inability to follow closely gave him time to make a few superficial
observations regarding his host. In spite of the fact that Guion had
been a familiar figure to him ever since his boyhood, he now saw him at
really close range for the first time in years.

What struck him most was the degree to which Guion conserved his quality
of Adonis. Long ago renowned, in that section of American society that
clings to the cities and seaboard between Maine and Maryland, as a fine
specimen of manhood, he was perhaps handsomer now, with his noble,
regular features, his well-trimmed, iron-gray beard, and his splendid
head of iron-gray hair, than he had been in his youth. Reckoning
roughly, Davenant judged him to be sixty. He had been a personage
prominently in view in the group of cities formed by Boston, Cambridge,
and Waverton, ever since Davenant could remember him. Nature having
created Guion an ornament to his kind, fate had been equally beneficent
in ordaining that he should have nothing to do, on leaving the
university, but walk into the excellent legal practice his grandfather
had founded, and his father had brought to a high degree of honor as
well as to a reasonable pitch of prosperity. It was, from the younger
Guion's point of view, an agreeable practice, concerned chiefly with the
care of trust funds, in which a gentleman could engage without any
rough-and-tumble loss of gentility. It required little or nothing in the
way of pleadings in the courts or disputing in the market-place,
and--especially during the lifetime of the elder partners--left him
leisure for cultivating that graceful relationship to life for which he
possessed aptitudes. It was a high form of gracefulness, making it a
matter of course that he should figure on the Boards of Galleries of
Fine Arts and Colleges of Music, and other institutions meant to
minister to his country's good through the elevation of its taste.

"It's the sort of thing he was cut out for," Davenant commented to
himself, as his eye traveled from the high-bred face, where refinement
blended with authority, to the essentially gentle