To bathe and dress did not take him very long. In the hall, which seemed to be the main living-room below, he prowled about, examining a number of antlers and boar-heads mounted on the beamed and plastered walls. The former had been set up in German fashion, antlers, brow-antlers, and frontal bone; and these trophies appeared to him uninteresting--even a trifle ghastly when the bleached skull also was included. The boars' heads were better, nothing extraordinary in size, but well-tusked. The taxidermy, however, was wretched. The square hall itself did not appear particularly inviting. The usual long oak table and benches were there, a number of leather arm-chairs, book-racks, cue-racks, gun-racks with glazed panes to protect the weapons, a festoon of spears, hunting knives and curly hunting horns, skins on the floor, brown bear, wolf, and stag. A badly stuffed otter displayed its teeth on the mantle over the fireplace between a pair of fighting cock pheasants and a jar of alcohol containing a large viper, which embellishments did not add to the cheerfulness of the place. For the rest there was a billiard table shrouded in a rubber cloth, and three well-engraved portraits on the walls, Bismarck, after Lehnbach, Frederick the Great playing on a flute like fury, and the great War Lord of Europe himself, mustaches on end, sombre-eyed, sullen, cased in the magnificent steel panoply of the Guard Cuirassiers. The art gallery bored Guild, and he opened a door which he suspected communicated with the pantry. It was a valet's closet and it smelled of camphor. Shooting-coats hung on stretchers; high-laced shooting-boots were ranged in rows. On a chair lay Karen's skirt and blouse-coat of covert cloth. Both were still slightly damp and wrinkled. Evidently they had been brought down here to be brushed and pressed while Karen slept. Passing his hand over the brown silk lining of the coat gave him no clue to the hiding-place of the papers; what revealed their presence was a seam which had been hurriedly basted with black thread. The keen point of his pocket-knife released the basting. He drew out the papers, counted them, identified them one by one, and placed them in his breast pocket. Then he laid the coat across the back of the chair again and went out. He had two hours to wait before there could be any decent hope of breakfast. Nobody seemed to be stirring in the house. After a few minutes he unlocked the front door and went out into the early sunshine. It was as warm as a spring day; rain had freshened grass and trees; he sat down on the fountain's rim and looked into the pool where a dozen trout lay motionless, their fins winnowing the icy water. No doubt some spring, high on the wooded hills, had been piped down to furnish the pool with this perpetually bubbling jet.