e shoulder, held me at arm's length, and
still addressing his brother: 'Do you know what this means?' said he.

"'It was the most deliberate act of my life,' says Mr. Henry.

"'I must have blood, I must have blood for this,' says the Master.

"'Please God it shall be yours,' said Mr. Henry; and he went to the
wall and took down a pair of swords that hung there with others,
naked. These he presented to the Master by the points. 'Mackellar
shall see us play fair,' said Mr. Henry. 'I think it very needful.'

"'You need insult me no more,' said the Master, taking one of the
swords at random. 'I have hated you all my life.'

"'My father is but newly gone to bed,' said Mr. Henry. 'We must go
somewhere forth of the house.'

"'There is an excellent place in the long shrubbery,' said the Master.

"'Gentlemen,' said I, 'shame upon you both! Sons of the same mother,
would you turn against the life she gave you?'

"'Even so, Mackellar,' said Mr. Henry, with the same perfect quietude
of manner he had shown throughout."

It is not necessary for Mackellar to tell us that, whereas Mr. Henry
is phlegmatic and deliberate, the Master is impulsive and mercurial.
It is not necessary for him to attempt analysis of the emotions and
thoughts of the leading characters, since these are sufficiently
evident from what they do and say. The action happens to the eye and
ear, without the interpretation of an analytic intellect; but the
reader is made actually present at the scene, and can see and judge
it for himself. The method is absolutely narrative and not at all
expository,--entirely objective and concrete. Surely this is the
most artistic means of portraying those elements of character which
contribute to external, or objective, events: and even what happens
inside the mind of a character may often be more poignantly suggested
by a concrete account of how he looks and what he does than by
an abstract analytic statement of the movements of his mind. When
Hepzibah Pyncheon opens her shop in the House of the Seven Gables, her
state of feeling is indicated indirectly, by what she does and how she
does it.

Perhaps the most delicate means of indirect delineation is to suggest
the personality of one character by exhibiting his effect upon certain
other people in the story. In the third book of the "Iliad," there is
a temporary truce upon the plains of Troy; and certain elders of the
city look forth from the tower of the Scaean gates and me