Witching Hill by E.W. Hornung

Coplestone was the first of our tenants who had taken his house through me, and I was extremely proud of him. It was precisely the pride of the mighty hunter in his first kill; for Coplestone was big game in his way, and even of a leonine countenance, with his crested wave of tawny hair and his clear sunburnt skin. In early life, as an incomparable oar, he had made a name which still had a way of creeping into the sporting papers; and at forty the same fine figure and untarnished face were a walking advertisement of virtue. But now he had also the grim eyes and stubborn jaw of the man who has faced big trouble; he wore sombre ties that suggested the kind of trouble it had been; and he settled down among us to a solitude only broken in the holidays of his only child, then a boy of twelve at a preparatory school.

I first heard of the boy's existence when Coplestone chose the papers for his house. Anything seemed good enough for the "three reception-rooms and usual offices"; but over a bedroom and a play room on the first floor we were an hour deciding against every pattern in the books, and then on the exact self-colour to be obtained elsewhere. It was at the end of that hour that a chance remark, about the evening paper and the latest cricket, led to a little conversation, insignificant in itself, yet enough to bring Coplestone and me into touch about better things than house decoration. Often after that, when he came down of an afternoon, he would look in at the office and leave me his _Pall Mall_. And he brought the boy in with him on the first day of the midsummer holidays.