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290 tures myself, and when I have done so, I will come back and report."

In his slow progress round the room he lost gradually the erect and steady bearing with which he had made his entrance; when he paused, his shoulders drooped, and when he moved on again they did not stiffen up to quite the old angle, which seemed always to denote the most complete confidence and self-respect. His face had grown pinched and withered in the last year; its hard brown muscles had slackened, and under his jaws hung loose folds of skin. The observation was made by more than one person that at last Colonel Halket was beginning to show his age; Marion Clark commented on it to Floyd.

"I'm afraid he's not well," she said.

"If he is n't, he's the most active sick man I ever saw," Floyd answered, preferring not to betray his own anxiety.

"There are so many things besides health that can make a man active," she remarked.

Floyd shared a common prejudice against being told that either he or a member of his family "was not looking well." Marion's resort to the brutal banality jarred on him and put him in a contentious mood. It implied a lack of Lydia's gentler sensitiveness; Lydia would never have roused one in so crude a way to an unpleasant fact. Yet why he should feel disappointment because Marion lacked something that Lydia had he could not understand; that had always been perfectly obvious. Possibly the disappointment came from an unconscious effort on his part to fit Marion immediately, even in the smallest details, into Lydia's place.

"I foresee," said Marion, with a humorous glance from Colonel Halket to Floyd, "that your grandfather's opinion is going to be favorable."

"You regard that as damaging?" he asked.

"No, not necessarily; I only regard it as final. In this