The motor turned suddenly in to the curb, and they got out.  The house before them, like its fellows, was entered from a high flight of red sandstone steps, and was built of a smooth, soapy green stone, with red coursings, an elaborate cornice and tiled Italian roof.  No one was sitting outside, although there was a pile of circular, grass-woven cushions; and Howat sharply rang the bell.  A maid in aproned black admitted them into a narrow hall, from which stairs mounted with a carved rail terminating in a newel post supporting an almost life-sized bronze nymph, whose flowing hair was encircled by a wreath of electrically lit flowers, and who held a dully shining sheaf of jonquils.  There was no other illumination, and Howat Penny discovered in the obscurity a high mirror bristling with elk horns, on which hung various hats and outer garments.  He stood helpless, apparently, in an attitude he found impossible to deny himself, waiting to be relieved of his coverings, when Mariana whispered angrily, “Don’t be so rotten, Howat.”

Finally the maid secured his cape, and he was conscious of a stir at the head of the stairs.  Immediately after, a shrill, subdued voice carried to where he stood.  “I told you,” it said violently, “... dress suit.”  There was an answering murmur, in which he could distinguish, James Polder’s impatient tones.  The latter descended, and flooded the hall with, light from a globe in the ceiling.  He was garbed in blue serge and flannels.  “Isabella,” he stated directly, belligerently even, “thinks we ought to change our clothes; but we never do, and I wouldn’t hear of—­of lying for effect.”  Howat Penny’s dislike for him pleasantly increased.  Mariana, in rose crepe with a soft, dull gold girdle and long, trumpet-like sleeves of flowered gauze, smiled at him warmly.  “It is a harmless pose of Howat’s,” she explained:  “a concession to the ghosts of the past.”  She patted the elder on the shoulder.

Above, James Polder ushered them into a room hung with crimson and gilt stamped paper, an elaborately fretted cherry mantel about the asbestos rectangle of an artificial hearth, and a multitude of chairs and divans shrouded in linen.  There was an upright, ebonized piano draped in a fringed, Roman scarf and holding a towering jar of roses, a great, carved easel with a painstaking, smooth oil painting of a dark man in an attitude of fixed dignity, and an expensively cased talking machine.  The original, evidently, of the portrait, and a small, rotund woman in mauve brocade, advanced to meet them.  Young Polder said, “My mother and father.  This is Miss Jannan and Mr. Howat Penny.”

The latter saw that Mrs. Byron Polder was distinctly nervous; she twisted the diamonds that occupied a not inconsiderable portion of her short fingers, and smiled rigidly.  “I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Jannan,” she proceeded; “and Mr. Penny too.”  She held out a hand, then half withdrew it; but Mariana captured it in her direct palm.  “Thank you,” she replied.  Byron Polder had a more confident poise; in reality there was a perceptible chill in his manner.  He was a handsome man, with a cleanly-shaven face, introspective brown eyes and a petulant, drooping mouth.  “You have succeeded in finding your way to my house,” he pronounced enigmatically, gazing at Howat Penny.