These, with a certain rebellious fold in his necktie, having been brought into place, the guardian of the Exeter entered the crowded room, picked a magazine from the shelves and dropped into his accustomed seat.
Holker Morris and Lagarge now strolled in and drawing up to a small table adjoining Peter's touched a tiny bell.

This answered, and the order given, the two renewed a conversation which had evidently been begun outside, and which was of so absorbing a character that for a moment Peter's face, half hidden by his book, was unnoticed.
"Oh!--that's you, Methusaleh, is it!" cried Morris at last.

"Move over--have something ?" Peter looked up smiling: "Not now, Holker.

I will later." Morris kept on talking.

Lagarge, his companion--a thin, cadaverous-looking man with a big head and the general air of having been carved out of an old root--a great expert in ceramics--listening intently, bobbing his head in toy-mandarin fashion whenever one of Holker's iconoclasms cleared the air.
"Suppose they did pay thirty thousand dollars for it," Holker insisted, slapping his knee with his outspread palm.