The house itself had been decently kept, and Lavendale came back to his old home to find a certain appearance of preparedness and comfort in the fine old rooms, with their curious admixture of furniture, English, French, and Dutch, the latter preponderating with its somewhat clumsy bulk and variegated inlaying; great tulip-wood cabinets, which reminded Lavendale of the coat of many colours in that story of Joseph and his brethren which he remembered poring over again and again in that dim long ago when he was a little lad at his mother's knees, and had pious readings for Sundays. Too soon had come the time when Sunday reading and Sunday as a day apart from other days had ceased to be for Lord Lavendale, and when he was in the first rank of fashionable infidels--the men who borrowed their opinions from Henry St. John, and welcomed the new light called Voltaire, a star just then showing pale and clear above the horizon. It was late in the evening when Lavendale and Durnford arrived at the Manor House. They had ridden from Bloomsbury--a thirty-mile ride--and had baited their horses at Kingston. The servants were retiring for the night when the great bell rang under the stone porch, and all the household was on the alert in a minute or two, deferentially receiving a master whom they could have wished had found his way to the other side of the Stygian stream rather than to disturb the placidity of their after-supper repose. Footmen were sent flying to lay a table, and sleepy cook and kitchen-wench explored the larder. While supper was being prepared, Lord Lavendale went to the farther end of the house, to a spacious vaulted apartment that had been a refectory in the days of the Cistercians, but was now a library. Beyond it there was a still larger room which had been a chapel, and, never converted to any secular purpose, had been left to bats, spiders, and emptiness. Lavendale had seen lights in the windows of this room as he rode up to the house, and he guessed that Signor Vincenti, chemist, student, and discoverer, was at work there. "Well, old mole!" he said gaily, as he opened the heavy oaken door, and stood looking at the Italian, who sat huddled up in a huge armchair beside a table loaded and scattered with volumes of all shapes and sizes, under the strong light of a curiously-shaped metal lamp, which made a central spot of vivid brightness in the great shadowy room. "You see we have not left you long to your solitary studies and your beloved seclusion. Durnford and I have come to badger you."