on whom his eye
fell. He was called Jonah by his employees; and he was called Jonah
partly because his visits to the places of their industry invariably
presaged disaster, but principally for the gross-minded and
wrongly-adduced reason that he had (in their opinion) a whale's belly.

IV

He bore a certain resemblance to a stunted whale. He was chiefly
abdominal. His legs appeared to begin, without thighs, at his knees, and
his face, without neck, at his chest. His face was large, both wide and
long, and covered as to its lower part with a tough scrub of grey beard.
The line of his mouth showed through the scrub and turned extravagantly
downwards at the corners. He had a commanding, heavily knobbed brow, and
small grey eyes of intense severity. His voice was cold, and his manner,
though intensely polished and suave, singularly stern and decisive. He
had an expression of "I have decided" and Sabre said that he kept this
expression on ice. It had an icy sound and it certainly had the rigidity
and imperviousness of an iceberg. Hearing it, one might believe that it
could have a cruel sound.

The Reverend Sebastian Fortune had come into the business at the age of
twenty-eight. He was now sixty-two. He had come in to find the
controlling interest almost entirely in the hands of the Fortune branch
of the firm, and in his thirty-four years of association, indeed in the
first twenty, he had, by fortuitous circumstances, and by force of his
decisive personality, achieved what amounted to sole and single control.
Coming in as a young man of force and character, he had added to these
qualities, by marriage, a useful sum of money (to which was attached a
widow) and proceeded to deal decisively with the East and the Sabre
(Mark Sabre's grandfather) of that day. Both were old men. The East,
young Mr. Fortune bought out neck and crop. The Sabre, who owned then a
fifth instead of a third interest in the business, and had developed, as
an obsession, an unreasonable fear of bankruptcy, he relieved of all
liability for the firm at the negligible cost of giving himself a free
hand in the conduct of the business. The deed of partnership was altered
accordingly. It was to this fifth share, without control, that Sabre's
father and, in his turn, Sabre succeeded.

V

Sabre had been promised full partnership by Mr. Fortune. He desired it
very greatly. The apportionment of duties in the establishment was that
Sabre managed the publishing