While the mistress and the cook were thus conferring, the young man gazed carelessly, and yet curiously, around this large low room in which his grandmother lived, and had spent the greater part of her life; and in which his father had been born. The low ceiling had been covered with canvas years before, but the original white of the canvas had long since turned to a smoky brown. The walls, which had never been plastered, were also covered with canvas, and afterward had been hung with old-fashioned wall-paper in hunting scenes. These had faded into a general effect of hazy dimness, but Lynn's keen young eyes made out the hunters, the hounds, and the game, as he lay idle with his long arms under his handsome dark head, wondering what sort of man his grandfather had been. He had heard it said that rooms are like the people who live in them, and, recalling the saying, he wondered again whether this room was now as it used to be in his grandfather's time. There stood his grandfather's secretary in one corner, still filled with papers, just as he must have left it. The bed in the opposite corner must also have stood in the same place for many a year. It had been a very stately edifice, a magnificent structure, in its day. It even yet upheld a heavy tester of faded crimson damask, gathered to the centre under a great golden star of tarnished splendor. It had evidently once been of imposing height, and it was still of unusual width, but it had lost something of its height with age, as human beings do. It had been much too high for old lady Gordon to climb into and out of, as easily as she liked, when she began to grow stouter and more indolent, and it was not her way to submit to any inconvenience which she could avoid. So that the thick mahogany legs of the grand old bed had been sawed off by degrees--as old lady Gordon's ease required--till it now squatted under its big, dusty red tester like some absurd turbaned old Turk. Lynn smiled as he looked at it, letting his gaze wander on to the tall chest of drawers, to the high-backed split-bottomed chairs, to a great oaken chest at the foot of the bed--to all the homely, comfortable, unbeautiful things.