The Lion's Skin (Paperback)

Mr. Caryll, lately from Rome, stood by the window, looking out over the rainswept, steaming quays to Notre Dame on the island yonder. Overhead rolled and crackled the artillery of an April thunderstorm, and Mr. Caryll, looking out upon Paris in her shroud of rain, under her pall of thundercloud, felt himself at harmony with Nature. Over his heart, too, the gloom of storm was lowering, just as in his heart it was still little more than April time. Behind him, in that chamber furnished in dark oak and leather of a reign or two ago, sat Sir Richard Everard at a vast writing-table all a-litter with books and papers; and Sir Richard watched his adoptive son with fierce, melancholy eyes, watched him until he grew impatient of this pause. "Well?" demanded the old baronet harshly. "Will you undertake it, Justin, now that the chance has come?" And he added: "You'll never hesitate if you are the man I have sought to make you." Mr. Caryll turned slowly. "It is because I am the man that you-that God and you-have made me that I do hesitate." His voice was quiet and pleasantly modulated, and he spoke English with the faintest slur-perceptible, perhaps, only to the keenest ear-of a French accent. To ears less keen it would merely seem that he articulated with a precision so singular as to verge on pedantry.