Edmund Paramor was a medium-sized and upright man of seventy, whose brown face was perfectly clean-shaven.  His grey, silky hair was brushed in a cock’s comb from his fine forehead, bald on the left side.  He stood before the hearth facing the room, and his figure had the springy abruptness of men who cannot fatten.  There was a certain youthfulness, too, in his eyes, yet they had a look as though he had been through fire; and his mouth curled at the corners in surprising smiles.  The room was like the man—­morally large, void of red-tape and almost void of furniture; no tin boxes were ranged against the walls, no papers littered up the table; a single bookcase contained a complete edition of the law reports, and resting on the Law Directory was a single red rose in a glass of water.  It looked the room of one with a sober magnanimity, who went to the heart of things, despised haggling, and before whose smiles the more immediate kinds of humbug faded.

“Well, Dick,” said he, “how’s your mother?”

Shelton replied that his mother was all right.

“Tell her that I’m going to sell her Easterns after all, and put into this Brass thing.  You can say it’s safe, from me.”

Shelton made a face.

“Mother,” said he, “always believes things are safe.”

His uncle looked through him with his keen, half-suffering glance, and up went the corners of his mouth.

“She’s splendid,” he said.

“Yes,” said Shelton, “splendid.”

The transaction, however, did not interest him; his uncle’s judgment in such matters had a breezy soundness he would never dream of questioning.

“Well, about your settlement”; and, touching a bell three times, Mr. Paramor walked up and down the room.  “Bring me the draft of Mr. Richard’s marriage settlement.”

The stalwart commissionaire reappearing with a document—­“Now then, Dick,” said Mr. Paramor.  “She ’s not bringing anything into settlement, I understand; how ’s that?”

“I did n’t want it,” replied Shelton, unaccountably ashamed.

Mr. Paramor’s lips quivered; he drew the draft closer, took up a blue pencil, and, squeezing Shelton’s arm, began to read.  The latter, following his uncle’s rapid exposition of the clauses, was relieved when he paused suddenly.

“If you die and she marries again,” said Mr. Paramor, “she forfeits her life interest—­see?”

“Oh!” said Shelton; “wait a minute, Uncle Ted.”

Mr. Paramor waited, biting his pencil; a smile flickered on his mouth, and was decorously subdued.  It was Shelton’s turn to walk about.

“If she marries again,” he repeated to himself.

Mr. Paramor was a keen fisherman; he watched his nephew as he might have watched a fish he had just landed.

“It’s very usual,” he remarked.

Shelton took another turn.

“She forfeits,” thought he; “exactly.”

When he was dead, he would have no other way of seeing that she continued to belong to him.  Exactly!