A quarter of an hour’s walking, beguiled by such talk as this, brought them to the house of which Lucius had spoken, a dwelling altogether out of keeping with the present character of the Shadrack-road. That heavily-buttressed wall, dark with the smoke and foul weather of centuries; that rusty iron gate, with its florid scroll work, and forgotten coat-of-arms (a triumph of the blacksmith’s art two hundred years old); that dark-browed building within, formed of a red-brick centre, square, many-windowed, and prosaic, with a tall narrow doorway, overshadowed by a stone shell, sustained by cherubic heads of the Anne period, flanked by an older wing of gray moss-discoloured stone, with massive mullioned windows, had nothing in common with the shabby rows and shops and skimpy terraces and bulkheads and low-roofed, disreputable habitations of the neighbourhood. It stood alone, a solitary relic of the past; splendid, gloomy, inscrutable. Nothing in the man Sivewright interested Lucius Davoren half so much as the fact that he lived in this queer old house. After all a man’s surroundings are often half the man, and our first impression of a new acquaintance is generally taken from his chairs and tables. The grim old iron gate was not a portal to be opened with a latch-key. It looked like one of the outworks of a fortification, to be taken by assault. Mr. Sivewright pulled at an iron ring, suspended beyond the reach of the gutter children of the district, and a remote bell rang within the fastness, a hoarse old bell, rusty no doubt like the gate. After a lengthy interval measured by the gauge of a visitor’s patience, but which Mr. Sivewright accepted with resignation as a thing of course, this summons produced an elderly female, with slippered feet, a bonnet, and bare arms, who unlocked the gate, and admitted them to an enclosure of fog, stagnant as compared with the fog in circulation without, and which seemed to the doctor of a lower temperature, as if in crossing that narrow boundary he had travelled a degree northward. ‘Come in,’ said Mr. Sivewright, with the tone of a man who offers reluctant hospitality, ‘and have a glass of wine. You’ve had a cold walk on my account; you’d better take a little refreshment.’ ‘No, thanks; but I should like to see your house.’ ‘Should you? There’s not much to see; an old barrack, that’s all,’ said the old man, stopping short, with a doubtful air, as if he would have infinitely preferred leaving the surgeon outside. ‘Very few strangers ever cross my threshold, except the taxgatherer. However,’ with an air of resignation, ‘come in.’