Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/81

70 her black dress—indeed, with the same figure that she had had thirty years before,—with a light Indian shawl thrown over her bare shoulders, with her head held as proudly as ever on her slim, unwrinkled neck, yet with her gray eyes and pale face showing a kindly soul; her husband, big, deep-chested, with white hair carefully parted on one side and then allowed to wave plume-like and unbrushed, with a face lean, and of a hard, sunburned brown, with lines across the brow and about the mouth that gave him an expression of thoughtfulness as well as of decision, with white mustache and imperial, and dark, deep-set eyes, of a singular piercing luminousness, but always piercing, never softening into a merry and twinkling light, never really accompanying his smile—and he smiled now at Floyd. He was striking, impressive, very handsome; he could hardly have been put into a gathering of men where he would not have been one of the two or three most commanding. Avalon was preëminently a town in which the richest must have been the leading citizen; it was extraordinary that this man should in all respects have the natural outward gifts to carry such distinction. It is quite probable that the professional genealogist was an inventive diplomat, but no one who ever saw Colonel Halket could doubt that blood as noble as Sir John Hakluyt's flowed in his veins.

In the dining-room, the butler was standing behind Mrs. Halket's chair; behind each of the other chairs waited a footman. The family entered to their places; with a concerted movement, the three servants thrust the three chairs forward; the family sat down. They bowed their heads; behind them the servants stood erect, staring; Colonel Halket said in his deep, musical voice, "Bless, O Lord, this food to Thy use, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen."

Then, after this moment of stillness, there was brisk activity,—a shaking of napkins, a scurrying back of the servants, and a scurrying forward again with three plates