was suffused with the artificial sunlight discovered by the great Reuter
forty years before; it had the colour-tone of a spring wood, and was
warmed and ventilated through the classical frieze grating to the exact
temperature of 18 degrees Centigrade. Mr. Templeton was a plain man,
content to live as his father had lived before him. The furniture, too,
was a little old-fashioned in make and design, constructed however
according to the prevailing system of soft asbestos enamel welded over
iron, indestructible, pleasant to the touch, and resembling mahogany. A
couple of book-cases well filled ran on either side of the bronze
pedestal electric fire before which sat the three men; and in the
further corners stood the hydraulic lifts that gave entrance, the one to
the bedroom, the other to the corridor fifty feet up which opened on to
the Embankment.

Father Percy Franklin, the elder of the two priests, was rather a
remarkable-looking man, not more than thirty-five years old, but with
hair that was white throughout; his grey eyes, under black eyebrows,
were peculiarly bright and almost passionate; but his prominent nose and
chin and the extreme decisiveness of his mouth reassured the observer as
to his will. Strangers usually looked twice at him.

Father Francis, however, sitting in his upright chair on the other side
of the hearth, brought down the average; for, though his brown eyes were
pleasant and pathetic, there was no strength in his face; there was even
a tendency to feminine melancholy in the corners of his mouth and the
marked droop of his eyelids.

Mr. Templeton was just a very old man, with a strong face in folds,
clean-shaven like the rest of the world, and was now lying back on his
water-pillows with the quilt over his feet.