ce and knowingness of William John Corin.
By way of extirpating at once any feeling of solitude, he was careful to
invite Jenny and May to take tea with them on the afternoon following
Trewhella's arrival. The first-floor sitting-room, once in the
occupation of Mr. Vergoe, looked very different nowadays; and indeed no
longer possessed much character. Corin's decorative extravagance had
never carried beyond the purchase of those glassy photographs of City
scenes in which from a confusion of traffic rise landmarks like St.
Paul's or the Royal Exchange. These, destined ultimately to adorn the
best parlor of his Cornish home, were now propped dismally against the
overmantel, individually obscured according to the vagaries of the
servant's dusting by a plush-bound photograph of Mr. Lloyd George. The
walls of the room were handed over to wall-paper save where two prints,
billowy with damp, showed Mr. Gladstone looking at the back of Mr.
Spurgeon's neck over some tabulated observations on tuberculosis among
cows.

Zachary Trewhella did more than share his friend's sitting-room: he
occupied it, not so much actively, as by sheer inanimate force. To see
him sitting in the arm-chair was to see a bowlder flung down in a flimsy
drawing-room. He was a much older man than Corin, probably about
thirty-eight, though Jenny fancied he could not be less than fifty. His
eyes, very deep brown and closely set, had a twinkle of money, and the
ragged mustache probably concealed a cruel and avaricious mouth. His
hands were rough and swollen with work and weather: his neck was lean
and his pointed ears were set so far back as to give his high
cheek-bones over which the skin was drawn very taut a prominence of
feature they would not otherwise have possessed. He belonged to a common
type of Cornish farmer, a little more than fox, a little less than wolf,
and judged by mere outward appearance, particularly on this occasion of
ill-fitting broadcloth and celluloid collar, he would strike the casual
glance as mean of form and feature. Yet he radiated force continually
and though actually a small man produced an effect of size and power. It
was impossible definitely to predicate the direction of this energy, to
divine whether it would find concrete expression in agriculture or lust
or avarice or religion. Yet so vitally did it exist that from the moment
Trewhella entered Corin's insignificant apartment, the room was haunted
by him, and not merely the ro