No sweep of leaf-covered hills seen through bending branches laden with blossoms; no stretch of sky or slant of sunshine; only a grim, funereal, artificial formality, as ungenial and flattening to a boy of his tastes, education and earlier environment as a State asylum's would have been to a red Indian fresh from the prairie.
On the morning after Morris's dinner (within eight hours really of the time when he had been so thrilled by the singing of the Doxology), Jack was in his accustomed seat at the small, adjustable accordion-built table--it could be stretched out to accommodate twenty-four covers--when his uncle entered this room.

Parkins was genuflecting at the time with his--"Cream, sir,--yes, sir.

Devilled kidney, sir?
Thank you, sir." (Parkins had been second man with Lord Colchester, so he told Breen when he hired him.) Jack had about made up his mind to order him out when a peculiar tone in his uncle's "Good morning" made the boy scan that gentleman's face and figure the closer.
His uncle was as well dressed as usual, looking as neat and as smart in his dark cut-away coat with the invariable red carnation in his buttonhole, but the boy's quick eye caught the marks of a certain wear and tear in the face which neither his bath nor his valet had been able to obliterate.

The thin lips--thin for a man so fat, and which showed, more than any other feature, something of the desultory firmness of his character--drooped at the corners.

The eyes were half their size, the snap all out of them, the whites lost under the swollen lids.