Page:Waylaid by Wireless - Balmer - 1909.djvu/28

Rh and chop. He rattled over the newspaper till he found the editorial and read it slowly.

The American reached over to a neighboring table for another copy of the newspaper in which the Briton was absorbed. He glanced across, hopefully, before he spread it beside his plate; but the Englishman gave no encouraging sign.

He was a tall and thin Briton, obsessed by an ancient and exalted ancestry, and with heredity heavy upon him. Not only must his heavy, sombre features and gray eyes and dull black hair have been determined for him by some eminent progenitor at least six centuries before, but even their expression must have been decided and established then.

Young Preston could almost see his companion carefully copying the stern facial arrangement of that founder of the family who, sometime in the Middle Ages, had perfected the best expression for that countenance, perpetuated his triumph in a portrait and handed it soberly down for his descendants to profit 10