After the dessert had been served on heavy silver salvers, Lady Cranstoun rose, and followed by her daughter, glided quietly from the room. A pause attended their exit. Then Lord Carthew observed suddenly: “If that portrait really resembles my absent host, he must be a man of very singular and striking appearance.” “He is indeed,” returned Dr. Graham, with emphasis. “Shall we adjourn to the smoking-room? The tapestry in this room is liable to be injured by smoke.” The smoking-room was the most genuinely comfortable room in the house which Claud had yet seen. Presumably Sir Philip, realizing that mediæval furniture did not blend with a proper enjoyment of Sir Walter Raleigh’s weed, had in this one instance adopted wholly modern and fashionable methods of decoration. The books which filled a case against the wall were nearly all French novels, the lounges were the perfection of comfort, and everything, from the shaded lamp to the liqueur stand, was from a London West-end firm. As Dr. Graham closed the door upon them Lord Carthew unconsciously heaved a sigh of relief. He himself had been reared in a spacious ancestral home, and had spent his boyhood between Northborough Castle in the Isle of Wight, Belgrave Square in London, and the comfortable country seat which his father had built himself in Norfolk. But Lord Northborough was both a man of the world and a patron of the arts, while Claud’s American mother seized with avidity upon every new device for beautifying her homes. The solemn bareness of the Chase was wholly new to him, and being keenly sensitive, Lord Carthew was, moreover, oppressed by an indefinable sentiment in the air of chilly gloom and repression, which Lady Cranstoun’s dejected, nervous manners, and the compressed lips of her beautiful daughter, helped to accentuate. “Now tell me, Dr. Graham,” he began, stretching his feet toward the pleasant warmth of the wood fire, “what manner of man is this Sir Philip Cranstoun? I have heard a good deal about him, and I am rather anxious to meet him.” Dr. Graham stirred the fire, cleared his throat, and glanced somewhat apprehensively round the room. “Sir Philip Cranstoun,” he began, “is a man of five or six and forty, in the prime of life, in fact, a stanch Conservative and belonging to one of the oldest families in England.” “Yes, I know all about that. But what I mean is--what is he like in his own home, toward his family, for instance, and his servants?”