His small face was almost lost, dog-like, under shaggy hair and overgrown eyebrows, both snow-white.

He had a look of irritable eagerness, seldom, however, expressed in words.

A sudden passion in the faded blue eyes; a quick spot of red in his old cheeks; these Marcella had often noticed in him, as though the flame of some inner furnace leapt.

He had been a Radical and a rebel once in old rick-burning days, long before he lost the power in his limbs and came down to be thankful for one of the parish almshouses.

To his social betters he was now a quiet and peaceable old man, well aware of the cakes and ale to be got by good manners; but in the depths of him there were reminiscences and the ghosts of passions, which were still stirred sometimes by causes not always intelligible to the bystander.
He had rarely, however, physical energy enough to bring any emotion--even of mere worry at his physical ills--to the birth.