Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/64

 rather like his sister Cassie in appearance—one of the black Pentlands who had appeared mysteriously in the line nearly a hundred years earlier, and he had burning black eyes that looked out from shaggy brows. . . a man as different in appearance and vigor from his son as it was possible to imagine. (For Anson was a typical Pentland—blond, with round blue eyes and an inclination when in health toward ruddiness.) One stood in awe of the old man: there was a grimness about the strong, rough-cut face and contracted lips, and a curious, indefinable air of disapproval which one was never able to pin down or analyze.

He was silent to-day, in one of the black moods which Olivia knew well meant that he was troubled. She knew that this time it had nothing to do with Jack's illness, for the boy sat there opposite them, looking stronger than he had looked in months. . . blond and pale and thin, with the blue veins showing at his pathetic wrists and on his thin, handsome temples.

Olivia had lived through bad times over Jack and she had lived through them always together with John Pentland, so there had grown up between them—the mother and the grandfather—a sense of understanding which was quite beyond speech. Together they had spent so many nights by the side of the boy, keeping him alive almost by the strength of their united wills, forcing him to live when, gasping for life, he would have slipped away easily into death. Together they had kept him in life, because they both loved him and because he was the last son of the family.

Olivia felt sometimes that Sybil, too, played a part in the never-ending struggle against death. The girl, like her grandfather, never spoke of such things, but one could read them in the troubled depths of her violet eyes. That long, weary struggle was one of the tragedies they never spoke of at Pentlands, leaving it buried in silence. One said, "Jack looks