I have suggested that the sunset light made everything lovely.  To say that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be a tribute to it perhaps too extreme.  It would easily have made him beautiful if he had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew of the Fagin type.  But he was a Jew of another and much less admirable type; a Jew with a very well-sounding name.  For though there are no hard tests for separating the tares and the wheat of any people, one rude but efficient guide is that the nice Jew is called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called Thornton Percy.  The keeper of the curiosity shop was of the Thornton Percy branch of the chosen people; he belonged to those Lost Ten Tribes whose industrious object is to lose themselves.  He was a man still young, but already corpulent, with sleek dark hair, heavy handsome clothes, and a full, fat, permanent smile, which looked at the first glance kindly, and at the second cowardly.  The name over his shop was Henry Gordon, but two Scotchmen who were in his shop that evening could come upon no trace of a Scotch accent.

These two Scotchmen in this shop were careful purchasers, but free-handed payers.  One of them who seemed to be the principal and the authority (whom, indeed, Mr. Henry Gordon fancied he had seen somewhere before), was a small, sturdy fellow, with fine grey eyes, a square red tie and a square red beard, that he carried aggressively forward as if he defied anyone to pull it.  The other kept so much in the background in comparison that he looked almost ghostly in his grey cloak or plaid, a tall, sallow, silent young man.

The two Scotchmen were interested in seventeenth-century swords.  They were fastidious about them.  They had a whole armoury of these weapons brought out and rolled clattering about the counter, until they found two of precisely the same length.  Presumably they desired the exact symmetry for some decorative trophy.  Even then they felt the points, poised the swords for balance and bent them in a circle to see that they sprang straight again; which, for decorative purposes, seems carrying realism rather far.

“These will do,” said the strange person with the red beard.  “And perhaps I had better pay for them at once.  And as you are the challenger, Mr. MacIan, perhaps you had better explain the situation.”

The tall Scotchman in grey took a step forward and spoke in a voice quite clear and bold, and yet somehow lifeless, like a man going through an ancient formality.

“The fact is, Mr. Gordon, we have to place our honour in your hands.  Words have passed between Mr. Turnbull and myself on a grave and invaluable matter, which can only be atoned for by fighting.  Unfortunately, as the police are in some sense pursuing us, we are hurried, and must fight now and without seconds.  But if you will be so kind as to take us into your little garden and see far play, we shall feel how——­”