Picture a low-ceilinged, mullion-windowed room, hung with faded red curtains, carpeted with gray drugget, embellished with sundry oil-paintings of dingy landscapes and impossible rusticities. Four high-backed oak chairs stood stiffly round the heavy mahogany table. A tattered rug thresholded the fireless grate. An escritoire stood against one wall, a melancholy bookcase against another. A cheap French clock on the mantel-piece chided the prodigal hours. On either side Romanesque warriors in bronze straddled impetuous chargers. By a window, whose lozenged panes were swept by festoons of ivy, Zeus Gildersedge sat in a cane-backed arm-chair. An antique round table stood beside him, bearing a decanter of claret, a small phial of laudanum, a couple of glasses, a tobacco-jar, ink-pot, and quill pen. He was a short, spare man, clad in rusty gray, collarless, dishevelled, unkempt as to beard and poll. The slant light of the western sun seemed to impress a peculiar pallor upon his waxen face. There were numberless wrinkles about his gray eyes, with their minutely contracted pupils. His mouth ran a hard, tense, anæmic line under his large nose. Eyebrows and beard were bushy, leonine, barbaric. A lethargic arrogance appeared to possess the man, a mean, self-centred torpor that seemed in actual harmony with the atmosphere of the room. Zeus Gildersedge was figuring lazily on the back of a dirty envelope, the cuffs of his gray shirt hanging unbuttoned over his bony wrists. A financial journal lay open on his knees. Now and again he would yawn soundlessly, and sip the glass that held the brown-red Lethe that he loved. As he scribbled, his hands quivered slightly. Hunched in his chair he looked like some sinister troll concocting mischief over his cups. On a sudden some subtle savor assailed his nostrils, a steaming scent of sacrifice that caused Zeus Gildersedge to straighten alertly in his chair. He sniffed the air with his big, carnivorous nose. The paper, with an expostulatory murmur, slipped from his knees to the floor. “Onions, is it!” A more vigorous investigation approved the villany. “Damn that woman! She’s always cooking two vegetables, the glutton!” He rose and rang the bell, and stood listening to the solitary clangor that came echoing through the silent house. The sordid minutiæ of his avaricious household were ever weighing on the man’s mind. Zeus Gildersedge could break his heart, or his apology for that organ, over the untimely disappearance of a pound of butter. A stout wench answered the bell, a loosely ample person, with red cheeks, glossy jet hair, and scintillant brown eyes. Her hair was fringed about a sensual face; she wore a red-flannel blouse, a black skirt, and certain tawdry fripperies that denounced the donor. She was Zeus Gildersedge’s only servant, and might indeed have been included with his opium and his claret as an especial luxury selfishly cherished for the sake of avarice. “What d’yer want?”