"`DEAR SIR'!" repeated Norbert, between set teeth."`IMPOSSIBLE TO ALLOW YOU TO CALL any more'!"These and other terms of his dismissal recurred to him during the morning, and ever and anon he looked up from his desk, his lips moving to the tune of those horrid phrases, and stared out at the street.
Basilisk glaring this, with no Christian softness in it, not even when it fell upon his own grandfather, sitting among the sages within easy eye-shot from the big window at Norbert's elbow.However, Colonel Flitcroft was not disturbed by the gaze of his descendant, being, in fact, quite unaware of it.The aged men were having a busy morning.
The conclave was not what it had been.[See Arp and all his works.] There had come, as the years went by, a few recruits; but faces were missing:
the two Tabors had gone, and Uncle Joe Davey could no longer lay claim to the patriarchship; he had laid it down with a half-sigh and gone his way.
Eskew himself was now the oldest of the conscript fathers, the Colonel and Squire Buckalew pressing him closely, with Peter Bradbury no great time behind.
To-day they did not plant their feet upon the brass rail inside the hotel windows, but courted the genial weather out-doors, and, as their summer custom was, tilted back their chairs in the shade of the western wall of the building.
"And who could of dreamed," Mr.Bradbury was saying, with a side-glance of expectancy at Eskew, "that Jonas Tabor would ever turn out to have a niece like that!"Mr.Arp ceased to fan himself with his wide straw hat and said grimly: