As he walked into this room, he heard the servant shuffling up the staircase. He deposited his hat and gloves on a small marble-top table in the centre of the room and then sent a swift look of investigation about him. Logs were smouldering in the deep, wide fireplace at the far end of the room, giving out little spurts of flame occasionally from their charred, ash-grey skeletons. The floor was covered with a bright, new rag carpet, and there was a horse-hair sofa in the corner, and two or three stiff, round-backed little chairs, the seats also covered with black horse-hair. A thick, gilt-decorated Holy Bible lay in the centre of the marble-top table, shamed now by contact with the crown of his unsaintly hat. On the mantel stood a large, flat mahogany clock with floral decorations and a broad, white face with vivid black numerals and long black hands. The walls were covered with a gaudy but expensive paper, in which huge, indescribable red flowers mingled regularly with glaring green leaves. Two "mottoes," worked in red and blue worsted and framed with narrow cross-pieces of oak, hung suspended in the corners beside the fireplace. One of them read "God Bless Our Home," the other a sombre line done in black: "Faith, Hope and Charity." Three black oval oak frames, laden with stiff leaves that glistened under a coat of varnish, contained faded, unlovely portraits,--one of a bewhiskered man wearing a tall beaver hat and a stiff black stock: another of a sloping-shouldered woman with a bonnet, from which a face, vague and indistinct, sought vainly to emerge. The third contained a mass of dry, brown leaves, some wisps of straw, and a few colourless pressed blossoms. On a table in front of one of the two windows stood a spindling Dutch lamp of white and delft blue, with a long, narrow chimney. There were two candlesticks on the mantel. All these features of the room he took in while he stood beside the centre table, awaiting the entrance of Viola Gwyn. He heard a door open softly and close upstairs, and then some one descending the steps; a few words spoken in the subdued voice of a woman and the less gentle response of the darky servant, who mumbled "Yas'm," and an instant later went out by the front door. Through the window he saw her go down the walk, the red shawl drawn tightly about her shoulders. He smiled. The clever Viola getting rid of the servant so that she could be alone with him, he thought, as he turned toward the door. A tall woman in black appeared in the doorway, paused there for a second or two, and then advanced slowly into the room. He felt the blood rush to his head, almost blinding him. His hand went out for the support of the table, his body stiffened and suddenly turned cold. The smile with which he intended to greet Viola froze on his lips.