coats and no high stocks. They looked down upon the boy as though
summoning him to the like service. No distinction in uniform could
obscure their resemblance to each other: that stood out with a
remarkable clearness. The Favershams were men of one stamp,--lean-faced,
hard as iron--they lacked the elasticity of steel--, rugged in feature;
confident in expression, men with firm, level mouths but rather narrow
at the forehead, men of resolution and courage, no doubt; but hardly
conspicuous for intellect, men without nerves or subtlety, fighting-men
of the first-class, but hardly first-class soldiers. Some of their
faces, indeed, revealed an actual stupidity. The boy, however, saw none
of their defects. To him they were one and all portentous and terrible;
and he had an air of one standing before his judges and pleading mutely
for forgiveness. The candle shook in his hand.

These Crimean knights, as his father termed them, were the worst of
torturers to Geoffrey Faversham. He sat horribly thralled, so long as
he was allowed; he crept afterwards to bed and lay there shuddering.
For his mother, a lady who some twenty years before had shone at the
Court of Saxe-Coburg, as much by the refinement of her intellect as by
the beauty of her person, had bequeathed to him a very burdensome
gift of imagination. It was visible in his face, marking him off
unmistakably from his father, and from the study portraits in the
hall. He had the capacity to foresee possibilities, and he could not
but exercise that capacity. A hint was enough for the boy. Straightway
he had a vivid picture before his mind, and as he listened to the men
at the dinner-table, their rough clipped words set him down in the
midst of their battlefields, he heard the drone of bullets, he
quivered expecting the shock of a charge. But of all the Crimean
nights this had been fraught with the most torments.