The Asking Price

Siward, at his desk, over which the May sunshine streamed, his crutches laid against his chair, sat poring over the piles of papers left there by Beverly Plank some days before with a curt recommendation that he master their contents.

Some of the papers were typewritten, some appeared to be engraved certificates of stock, a few were in Plank's heavy, squat handwriting. There were several packages tied in pink tape, evidently legal papers of some sort; and also a pile of scrap-books containing newspaper clippings to which Siward referred occasionally, or read them at length, resting his thin, fatigued face between two bony hands.

The curious persistence of youth in his features seemed unaccountable in view of the heavy marks imprinted there; but they were marks, not lines; bluish hollows under eyes still young, marred contours of the cheek-bone; a hardness about the hollow temples above which his short, bright hair clustered with all its soft, youthful allure undimmed; and in every movement, every turn of his head, there still remained much of that indefinable attractiveness which had always characterised his race--much of the unconscious charm usually known as breeding.

In men of Mortimer's fibre, dissipation produced coarser symptoms--distended veins, and sagging flesh--where in Siward it seemed to bruise and harden, driving the colour of blood out of him and leaving the pallor of marble, and the bluish shadows of it staining the hollows. Only the eyes had begun to change radically; something in them had been quenched.