distinctly old-fashioned character of the house, he remarked a very complete installation of electric light, and an ingenious system of hot-air ventilation, by means of which a temperature of over seventy degrees was maintained throughout the whole interior. This produced a heavy and enervating atmosphere of which Laurence—fresh from the strong clean air of the Atlantic—became increasingly and disagreeably sensible. It made him at once restless and inert; and as he wandered, rather aimlessly from room to room, he was annoyed by finding a slight nervousness gained on him—he, whose nerves were usually of the steadiest, happily conspicuous by their absence, indeed, rather than by their presence!

"Upon my word, this beats the American abomination of steam heat," he said to himself.

His visit to the library, where the smell of old leather bindings added to the deadness of the air, nearly finished him. He went out on to the corridor, and paced the length of it, past the flying staircase of black oak leading to the upper corridor, and back again. A broad strip of deep-pile, crimson carpet was spread along the centre of the polished floor. On one hand, between the doors of the living-rooms, hung a collection of valuable copper-plate engravings, representing classic ruins in Italy and Greece. While on the other, in the spaces between the windows, were ranged a series of busts—Augustus, Tiberias, Nero, the two Antonines, Caligula, and Commodus—set on tall columnar pedestals of dark green or yellow marble. The blind, sculptured faces deepened the general sense of oppression by their rigidity, their unalterable and somewhat scornful repose.

Out of doors the March morning was tumultuous with wind and wet, offering marked contrast to the dry heat, the almost burdensome order and stillness reigning within. The air of the corridor was perhaps a degree fresher than that of the library he had just quitted. Laurence leaned his arms on a stone window-sill, and glanced in a desultory way at the day's Times, which he had picked up off the hall table in passing. But Chinese railway concessions, plague reports from Bombay, even the last racing fixtures, or rumours of fighting on the North-West Indian Frontier, failed to arouse his interest. In his present humour, these items of news from the outside world seemed curiously unimportant and remote. He stared at the wide, well-wooded, rain-blurred landscape. The scene at which he had assisted last night, the intimate drama moving forward relentlessly even now to its close in that well-appointed room upstairs—and the extraordinary character of the chief actor in that drama—his 

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