He was a fairly tall man, with thin gray hair round the sides of his
head, but none on the crown nor on his face, the chief characteristics
of which were the square jaw, the extremely long upper lip, the flat
nose, and the very small blue-gray eyes. He looked sixty, and was
scarcely fifty. He looked one moment like a Nonconformist local preacher
who had mistaken his vocation; but he was nothing of the kind. He looked
the next moment like a good hater and a great scorner of scruples; and
he was.
These two men had not exchanged a word, had not even seen each other,
save at the rarest intervals, for nearly a quarter of a century. They
were the principals in a quarrel of the most vivid, satanic, and
incurable sort known to anthropological science--the family quarrel--and
the existence of this feud was a proof of the indisputable truth that it
sometimes takes less than two to make a quarrel. For, though Owen Hugo
was not absolutely an angel, Ravengar had made it single-handed.
The circumstances of its origin were quite simple. When Louis Ravengar
was nine years old, his father, a widower, married a widow with one
child, aged six. That child was Hugo. The two lads, violently different
in temperament--the one gloomy and secretive, the other buoyant and
frank--with no tie of blood or of affection, were forced by destiny to
grow up together in the same house, and by their parents even to sleep
in the same room.
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