were peering at something just out of sight.  A courtly touch in his style was probably a matter of inheritance, as was also his capacity for looking suitably attired while obviously neglectful of appearances.  His thick, lank, sandy hair, fading to white, and long, narrow, stringy beard of the same transitional hue were not well cared for; and yet they helped to give him a little of the air of a Titian or Velasquez nobleman.  In answer to Guion now, he spoke without lifting his eyes from his plate.

“Have I been hearing things?  N-no; only that the care of big estates is a matter of great responsibility—­and anxiety.”

“That’s what I tell papa,” Miss Guion said, warmly, catching the concluding words.  “It’s a great responsibility and anxiety.  He ought to be free from it.  I tell him my marriage is a providential hint to him to give up work.”

“Perhaps I sha’n’t get the chance.  Work may give up—­me.”

“I wish it would, papa.  Then everything would be settled.”

“Some things would be settled.  Others might be opened—­for discussion.”

If Rodney Temple had not lifted his eyes in another significant look toward Guion, Davenant would have let these sentences pass unheeded.  As it was, 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