"
"You will come with me?" Morriston suggested. "You might fetch your
friend, Gifford."
Kelson nodded, opened the drawing-room door and called Gifford out, while
Morriston waited in the hall.
"The brother has turned up," he said as the two men joined him. "No doubt
to make inquiries. What are we to say to him?"
"There is nothing to be said but the bare, inevitable truth," Gifford
answered. "You can't now break it to him by degrees."
Morriston led the way to the library. By the fire stood a keen-featured,
sharp-eyed man of middle height and lithe figure, whose manner and first
movements as the door opened showed alertness and energy of character.
There was a certain likeness to his brother in the features and dark
complexion as well as in a suggestion of unpleasant aggressiveness in the
expression of his face, but where the dead man's personality had
suggested determination overlaid with an easy-going, indulgent spirit of
hedonism this man seemed to bristle with a restless mental activity, to
be all brain; one whose pleasures lay manifestly on the intellectual
side. One thing Gifford quickly noted, as he looked at the man with a
painful curiosity, was that the face before him lacked much of the
suggestion of evil which in the brother he had found so repellent.
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