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THE QUESTIONER.
"What has thee come to say ?" Sitting in his high-backed chair, Luke Claridge seemed a part of its dignified severity.

In the sparsely furnished room with its uncarpeted floor, its plain teak table, its high wainscoting and undecorated walls, the old man had the look of one who belonged to some ancient consistory, a judge whose piety would march with an austerity that would save a human soul by destroying the body, if need be.
A crisis had come, vaguely foreseen, sombrely eluded.

A questioner was before him who, poor, unheeded, an ancient victim of vice, could yet wield a weapon whose sweep of wounds would be wide.

Stern and masterful as he looked in his arid isolation, beneath all was a shaking anxiety.
He knew well what the old chair-maker had come to say, but, in the prologue of the struggle before him, he was unwittingly manoeuvring for position.
"Speak," he added presently, as Soolsby fumbled in his great loose pockets, and drew forth a paper.