this you must permit, Orion--you were quite right just now, Neforis; his
mouth and brow might have been taken from his father's face."

The remark was quite accurate; and yet it would have been hard to imagine
two men more unlike than the bright youth full of vitality, and the
languid old man on the couch, to whom even the small exertion of moving
the men was an effort. The Mukaukas might once have been like his son,
but in some long past time. Thin grey locks now only covered one half of
his bald head, and of his eyes, which, thirty years since, had sparkled
perhaps as keenly as Orion's, there was usually nothing, or very little
to be seen; for the heavy lids always drooped over them as though they
had lost the power to open, and this gave his handsome but deathly-pale
face a somewhat owl-like look. It was not morose, however; on the
contrary the mingled lines of suffering and of benevolent kindliness
resulted in an expression only of melancholy. The mouth and flabby
cheeks were as motionless as though they were dead. Grief, anxiety and
alarms seemed to have passed over them with a paralysing hand and had
left their trace there. He looked like a man weary unto death, and still
living only because fate had denied him the grace to die. Indeed, he had
often been taken for dead by his family when he had dipped too freely
into a certain little blood-stone box to take too many of the white
opium-pills, one of which he placed between his colorless lips at long
intervals, even during his game of draughts.

He lifted each piece slowly, like a sleeper with his eyes half shut; and
yet his opponent could not hold her own against his wary tactics and was
defeated by him now for the third time, though her uncle himself called
her a good player. It was easy to read in her high, smooth brow and
dark-blue eyes with their direct gaze, that she could think clearly and
decisively, and also feel deeply. But she seemed wilful too, and