But if the outer appearance of the mansion was noble and imposing, its interior decoration made it one of the richest and most wonderful houses in London. In all his journeyings about the face of the earth Mr. Topsparkle had amused himself by the collection of curios; and as his purse was long and his taste universal, he had gathered together the most heterogeneous assemblage of the beautiful and the ugly that had ever been amassed by one man or exhibited under one roof. The spacious hall which Lavendale entered at Lady Judith's invitation was hung with Venetian tapestry from the palace of a fourteenth-century Doge, and almost black with age. But as a relief against that sombre background there hung a unique collection of Moorish and Indian arms, while the foreground of the room was enlivened with everything frivolous and elegant in the way of china monsters, Meissen porcelain, carved ivory, French fans and bonbon-boxes, filigree-silver caskets, bronze statuettes, gold snuffboxes, and Indian gods, all scattered, as it were, haphazard upon a variety of small tables of more or less eccentric designs. On the left of this hall opened a suite of drawing-rooms which served also as one continuous picture-gallery, and which contained a collection of French and Italian masters acknowledged to be one of the best in England. On the right was the dining-room--an immense apartment, which better deserved the name of banqueting-hall. Here everything was of carved oak, ponderous, gigantic, and strictly Dutch, and here the pictures were by Dutch and Flemish painters. A replica of Rubens' "Descent from the Cross" hung over the sideboard, and the rest of the wall was a mosaic of cabinet pictures, every one a gem. The hall was lighted with clusters of wax candles in bronze candelabra dotted here and there about the tables, and making only islets of light in the gloom of those dark walls, against which Moorish breast-plates and Indian targets flashed and gleamed with faintly phosphorescent brightness. But at one end of the hall there was an enormous wood fire, which made a rosy atmosphere all round it; and it was in this roseate glow that Judith seated herself, sinking into a capacious armchair covered with stamped and gilt leather: a chair in which it was supposed Count Egmont had sat when he was tried for his life in the Town Hall at Brussels. She flung off cloak and mask, and appeared in all the brilliancy of gold brocade and diamonds, a beautiful dazzling apparition which seemed hardly human in that fairy-like fire-glow. She touched a little bell, and her lacqueys began to arrange a table for chocolate; and before it could be brought three of her lady friends came trooping in, also cloaked and masked, with two gentlemen in attendance upon them.