“We’ll find it upstairs, I think,” Richard assured him, and led the way with Aunt Ruth.  “I’m sorry we have no lift,” he said to her, “but the stairs are rather easy, and we’ll take them slowly.”

Aunt Ruth puzzled a little over this speech, but made nothing of it and wisely let it go.  The stairs were easy, extremely easy, and so heavily padded that she seemed to herself merely to be walking up a slight, velvet-floored incline.  The whole house, it may be explained, was fitted and furnished after the style of that period in the latter half of the last century, when heavily carpeted floors, heavily shrouded windows, heavily decorated walls, and heavily upholstered chairs were considered the essentials of luxury and comfort.  Old Matthew Kendrick had never cared to make any changes, and his grandson had had too little interest in the place to recommend them.  The younger man’s own private rooms he had altered sufficiently to express his personal tastes, but the rest of the house was to him outside the range of his concern.  The whole place, including his own quarters, was to him merely a sort of temporary habitation.  He had no plans in relation to it, no sense of responsibility in regard to it.  When he had ordered the finest suite of rooms in the house to be put in readiness for the guests, it was precisely as he would have requested the management of a great hotel to place at his disposal the best they had to offer.  To tell the truth, he had no recollection at all of how the rooms looked or what their dimensions were.

Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray, entering the first room of the series, a large and elaborately furnished apartment with the effect of a drawing-room, much gilt and brocade and many mirrors in evidence, looked at Richard in some surprise, as he seated them.  He himself went to the door of a second room, glanced in, nodded, and returned to his guests.

“I hope you will find everything you want in there,” he said.  “If you don’t, please ring.  You will see your dressing-room on the left, Mr. Gray.  I will send you my man in the morning to see if he can do anything for you.”

“I shan’t need any man, thank you,” protested Mr. Gray.

When, after lingering a minute or two, their young host had bade them good-night and left them, the elderly pair looked at each other.  Uncle Rufus’s eyes were twinkling, but in his wife’s showed a touch of soft indignation.

“It seems like making a joke of us,” said she, “to put us in such a place as this, when he can guess what we’re used to.”

“He doesn’t mean it as a joke,” her husband protested good-humouredly.  “He wants to give us the best he’s got.  I don’t mind a mite.  To be sure, I could get along with one looking-glass to shave myself in, but it’s kind of interesting to know how many some folks think necessary when they aren’t limited.  Let’s go look in our sleeping-room.  Maybe that’s a little less princely.”

Aunt Ruth limped slowly across the Persian carpet, and stood still in the doorway of the room Richard had designated as hers.  Uncle Rufus stared in over her small shoulder.