nourishment than usual. This morning he was very hungry, having already been
up and about for an hour; and he decided to allow himself a third piece of
toast and an additional egg; the rest as usual. The remaining deficit must be
made up at luncheon, but that could be gone into later.

So much being determined, Mr. Cupples applied himself to the enjoyment of the
view for a few minutes before ordering his meal. With a connoisseur's eye he
explored the beauty of the rugged coast, where a great pierced rock rose from
a glassy sea, and the ordered loveliness of the vast tilted levels of pasture
and tillage and woodland that sloped gently up from the cliffs toward the
distant moor. Mr. Cupples delighted in landscape.

He was a man of middle height and spare figure, nearly sixty years old, by
constitution rather delicate in health, but wiry and active for his age. A
sparse and straggling beard and moustache did not conceal a thin but kindly
mouth; his eyes were keen and pleasant; his sharp nose and narrow jaw gave him
very much of a clerical air, and this impression was helped by his commonplace
dark clothes and soft black hat. The whole effect of him, indeed, was
priestly. He was a man of unusually conscientious, industrious, and orderly
mind, with little imagination. His father's household had been used to recruit
its domestic establishment by means of advertisements in which it was
truthfully described as a serious family. From that fortress of gloom he had
escaped with two saintly gifts somehow unspoiled: an inexhaustible kindness of
heart, and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed nothing to humour. In an
earlier day and with a clerical training he might have risen to the scarlet
hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded member of the London Positivist
Society, a retired banker, a widower without children. His austere but not
unhappy life was spent largely among books and in museums; his profound and
patiently accumulated knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected subjects
which had stirred his interest at different times had given him a place in the