My father did not reply to Lewis’s discourse.  His comment was in another quarter.

“Here is young Marshall and Gaeki,” he said.

The lawyer rose and came over to the window.

Two persons were advancing from the direction of the stables — a tall, delicate boy, and a strange old man.  The old man walked with a quick, jerky, stride.  It was the old country doctor Gaeki.  And, unlike any other man of his profession, he would work as long and as carefully on the body of a horse as he would on the body of a man, snapping out his quaint oaths, and in a stress of effort, as though he struggled with some invisible creature for its prey.  The negroes used to say that the devil was afraid of Gaeki, and he might have been, if to disable a man or his horse were the devil’s will.  But I think, rather, the negroes imagined the devil to fear what they feared themselves.

“Now, what could bring Gaeki here?” said Lewes.

“It was the horse that Gosford overheated in his race to you,” replied my father.  “I saw him stop in the road where the negro boy was leading the horse about, and then call young Marshall.”

“It was no fault of young Marshall, Pendleton,” said the lawyer.  “But, also, he is no match for Gosford.  He is a dilettante.  He paints little pictures after the fashion he learned in Paris, and he has no force or vigor in him.  His father was a dreamer, a wanderer, one who loved the world and its frivolities, and the son takes that temperament, softened by his mother.  He ought to have a guardian.”

“He has one,” replied my father.

“A guardian!” repeated Lewis.  “What court has appointed a guardian for young Marshall?”

“A court,” replied my father, “that does not sit under the authority of Virginia.  The helpless, Lewis, in their youth and inexperience, are not wholly given over to the spoiler.”

The boy they talked about was very young — under twenty, one would say.  He was blue-eyed and fair-haired, with thin, delicate features, which showed good blood long inbred to the loss of vigor.  He had the fine, open, generous face of one who takes the world as in a fairy story.  But now there was care and anxiety in it, and a furtive shadow, as though the lad’s dream of life had got some rude awakening.

At this moment the door behind my father and Lewis was thrown violently open, and a man entered.  He was a person with the manner of a barrister, precise and dapper; he had a long, pink face, pale eyes, and a close-cropped beard that brought out the hard lines of his mouth.  He bustled to the table, put down a sort of portfolio that held an inkpot, a writing-pad and pens, and drew up a chair like one about to take the minutes of a meeting.  And all the while he apologized for his delay.  He had important letters to get off in the post, and to make sure, had carried them to the tavern himself.

“And now, sirs, let us get about this business,” he finished, like one who calls his assistants to a labor: