Next second George dropped his head on to the ground again, and began to moan in an ostentatious manner, possibly in order to attract some one whose footsteps could be plainly heard proceeding slowly down a shrubbery-path on the other side of the yard wall.  At any rate, that was the effect produced; for next moment, before Philip could think of escape, had he wished to escape, a door in the wall was opened, and a gentleman, pausing on the threshold, surveyed the whole scene, with the assistance of a gold-mounted eye-glass, with some evident surprise and little apparent satisfaction.

The old gentleman, for he was old, made so pretty a picture, framed as he was in the arched doorway, and set off by a natural background of varying shades of green, that his general appearance is worth sketching as he stood.  To begin with, he was dressed in the fashion of the commencement of this century, and, as has been said, old, though it was difficult to say how old.  Indeed, so vigorous and comparatively youthful was his bearing that he was generally taken to be considerably under seventy, but, as a matter of fact, he was but a few years short of eighty.  He was extremely tall, over six feet, and stood upright as a lifeguardsman; indeed, his height and stately carriage would alone have made him a remarkable-looking man, had there been nothing else unusual about him; but, as it happened, his features were as uncommon as his person.  They were clear-cut and cast in a noble mould.  The nose was large and aquiline, the chin, like his son Philip’s, square and determined; but it was his eyes that gave a painful fascination to his countenance.  They were steely blue, and glittered under the pent-house of his thick eyebrows, that, in striking contrast to the snow-white of his hair, were black in hue, as tempered steel glitters in a curtained room.  It was those eyes, in conjunction with sundry little peculiarities of temper, that had earned for the old man the title of “Devil Caresfoot,” a sobriquet in which he took peculiar pride.  So pleased was he with it, indeed, that he caused it to be engraved in solid oak letters an inch long upon the form of a life-sized and life-like portrait of himself that hung over the staircase in the house.

“I am determined,” he would say to his son, “to be known to my posterity as I was known to my contemporaries.  The picture represents my person not inaccurately; from the nickname my descendants will be able to gather what the knaves and fools with whom I lived thought of my character.  Ah! boy, I am wearing out; people will soon be staring at that portrait and wondering if it was like me.  In a very few years I shall no longer be ‘devil,’ but ‘devilled,’” and he would chuckle at his grim and ill-omened joke.

Philip felt his father’s eyes playing upon him, and shrunk from them.  His face had, at the mere thought of the consequences of his chastisement of his cousin, lost the beauty and animation that had clothed it a minute before; now it grew leaden and hard, the good died away from it altogether, and, instead of a young god bright with vengeance, there was nothing but a sullen youth with dull and frightened eyes.  To his son, as to most people who came under his influence, “Devil” Caresfoot was a grave reality.