“Since it holds you, my dear, how could it be otherwise?”
She laughed and looked at Sylvester with some coquetry. Here was a lesson in compliment by which he might profit. Sylvester thrust forward an armchair for his father.
“Tired?”
“Of course not. What has a healthy man got to do with being tired? No, my dear Ella, please don't. You know I disapprove of cushions. They are for the young and delicate.”
“Where shall we haye tea?” asked Ella. “Here, or in the drawing-room? Aunt Agatha is in her district.”
“Oh, here, then, by all means. We can have it comfortably.”
Ella rang the bell and cleared an occasional table of a litter of pipes, cigar-boxes, and papers. Matthew Lanyon lay back in his chair with the air of a man who had earned his home comforts, and stretched out his feet to the fire. Then he put his invariable question,—
“How's Dorothy?”
Sylvester replied, gave the usual bulletin as to her health, recounted the small incidents in the child's day. She had driven with him on his rounds that morning; during one of the waits had urgently requested Peck, the coachman, to die forthwith—straight and stiff—so that she might have the pleasure of seeing how her father brought him to life again. Her mind had been much exercised by a picture in the Family Bible of the raising of Jairus' daughter, and had identified her parent with the chief actor in the scene.
Tea arrived during the narration. Matthew listened with amused interest, for his son and his son's child were the dearest things earth held for him. His wife had died many years ago, when Sylvester was just emerging from boyhood and the great glory had gone out of his heaven. But his love for Sylvester had deepened, and of late years the sad parallelism of their widowed lives had drawn the two men very near together. In many ways they were singularly alike, the mere facial resemblance stamping them at the first glance as father and son; both were grave, intellectual-looking men, of the same clean, wiry make, with an air of reserve and good breeding that commanded respect. But the older man possessed that peculiar grace of manner, called nowadays of the old school, which the brusquer habits of more modern times have forbidden to flourish. Both faces bore the marks of suffering; but the passage of the years had chastened that of the father, who looked more frankly at the world than the son and out of kindlier grey eyes. He was a little over sixty, his hair whitening fast; still he held himself erect, and scoffed satirically at old age.