Daniel, frowning like a Rhine baron of the good old time, had his books before him, but they were closed. It was a bad sign that even the Version in the Hebrew had no attraction for him.
Mr. Maliphant alone was smiling. His smiles, in such an assemblage of melancholy faces, produced an incongruous effect. The atmosphere was charged with gloom—it was funereal: in the midst of it the gay and cheerful countenance, albeit wrinkled, of the old man, beamed like the sun impertinently shining amid fog and rain, sleet and snow. The thing was absurd. Harry felt the force of Miss Kennedy's remark that the occupants of the room reminded her of a fortuitous concourse of flies, or ants, or rooks, or people in an omnibus, each of whom was profoundly occupied with its own affairs and careless of its neighbors. Out of six in the room, five were unhappy: they did not ask for, or expect, the sympathies of their neighbors; they did not reveal their anxieties; they sat and suffered in silence; the sixth alone was quite cheerful: it was nothing to him what experiences the rest were having, whether they were enjoying the upper airs, or enduring hardness. He sat in his own place near the professor: he laughed aloud; he even talked and told stories, to which no one listened. When Harry appeared, he was just ending a story which he had never begun:
"So it was given to the other fellow. And he came from Baxter Street, close to the City Hall, which is generally allowed to be the wickedest street in New York City."
He paused a little, laughed cheerfully, rubbed his dry old hands together, smoked his pipe in silence, and then concluded his story, having filled up the middle in his own mind, without speech.
"And so he took to the coasting trade off the Andes."
Harry caught the eye of the professor, and beckoned him to come outside.
"Now," he said, taking his arm, "what the devil is the matter with all of you?"
The professor smiled feebly under the gas-lamp in the street, and instantly relapsed into his anxious expression.