The room into which Lennox was ushered, after leaving his handbag and cane outside, was a large apartment, with a sort of sombre stateliness about it which might be imposing, but which was certainly anything but cheerful. Cheerful, indeed, on the brightest day in summer it was hardly possible that this room could be. Its panelled walls were black with age. Here and there a family portrait, dim and faded, and incrusted with the accumulated grime of generations, stared out at you with ghostly eyes from the more ghostly depths of blackness behind it. Whatever colour the ceiling might once have been, it was now one dull pervading hue of dingy brown. Two or three Indian rugs on the floor; a bureau carved with leaves and flowers, from the midst of which queer faces peeped out; two or three tables with twisted legs; an Oriental jar or two, and a few straight-backed chairs, formed, with two exceptions, the sole furniture of the room. The windows were high and narrow, and three in number. They were filled with small lozenge-shaped panes of thick greenish glass, set in lead; through which even the brightest summer sunlight penetrated with a chastened lustre, as though it were half afraid to venture inside. It was night now, and in the silver sconces over the chimney-piece, and in the silver candlesticks on one of the tables, some half-dozen wax-candles were alight; but in that big gloomy room their feeble flame seemed to do little more than make darkness visible. High up in the middle window was the family escutcheon in painted glass, and below it a scroll with the family motto: _What I have, I hold_. The two exceptions in question were these: a high screen of dark stamped leather, the figures on which, originally gilt, showed nothing more than a patch here and there of their whilom lustre; and a huge chair, which was also covered with the same dark leather. In this chair was seated the Master of Heron Dyke. The screen was drawn up behind him, and although the evening was close on midsummer, in the big open fireplace, in front of which he was sitting, the stump of a tree was slowly burning; crackling and sputtering noisily every now and then, as though defying till the last the flames that were gradually eating it away.