less nourishment than usual. This
morning he was very hungry, having already been up and about for an
hour; and he decided to allow himself a third piece of toast and an
additional egg; the rest as usual. The remaining deficit must be made up
at luncheon; but that could be gone into later.

So much being determined, Mr. Cupples applied himself to the enjoyment
of the view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With a
connoisseur's eye he explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a
great pierced rock rose from a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness of
the vast tilted levels of pasture and tillage and woodland that sloped
gently up from the cliffs toward the distant moor. Mr. Cupples delighted
in landscape.

He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old,
by constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his
age. A sparse and straggling beard and mustache did not conceal a thin
but kindly mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and
narrow jaw gave him very much the air of a priest, and this impression
was helped by his commonplace dark clothes and soft black hat. He was a
man of unusually conscientious, industrious and orderly mind, with
little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit its
domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was
truthfully described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he
had escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an inexhaustible
kindness of heart and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed nothing
to humor. In an earlier day and with a clerical training he might have
risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded member of
the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a widower without
children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books
and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a
number of curiously disconnected subjects which had stirred his interest
at different times had given him a place in the quiet, half-lit world of
professors and curators and devotees of research; at their amiable,
unconvivial dinner-parties he was most himself. His favorite author was
Montaigne.

Just as Mr. Cupples was finishing his meal at a little table on the
veranda, a big motor-car turned into the drive before the hotel. "Who is
this?" he inquired of the waiter. "Id is der manager," said the young
man listlessly. "He ha