They saluted their host’s nephew with friendly familiarity, and Mr. Grisben, who seemed the spokesman of the two, ended his greeting with a genial—­“and many many more of them, dear boy!” which suggested to Faxon that their arrival coincided with an anniversary.  But he could not press the inquiry, for the seat allotted him was at the coachman’s side, while Frank Rainer joined his uncle’s guests inside the sleigh.

A swift flight (behind such horses as one could be sure of John Lavington’s having) brought them to tall gateposts, an illuminated lodge, and an avenue on which the snow had been levelled to the smoothness of marble.  At the end of the avenue the long house loomed through trees, its principal bulk dark but one wing sending out a ray of welcome; and the next moment Faxon was receiving a violent impression of warmth and light, of hothouse plants, hurrying servants, a vast spectacular oak hall like a stage setting, and, in its unreal middle distance, a small concise figure, correctly dressed, conventionally featured, and utterly unlike his rather florid conception of the great John Lavington.

The shock of the contrast remained with him through his hurried dressing in the large impersonally luxurious bedroom to which he had been shown.  “I don’t see where he comes in,” was the only way he could put it, so difficult was it to fit the exuberance of Lavington’s public personality into his host’s contracted frame and manner.  Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon’s case had been rapidly explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief.  “Make yourself at home—­at home!” he had repeated, in a tone that suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform the feat he urged on his visitor.  “Any friend of Frank’s ... delighted ... make yourself thoroughly at home!”

II

In spite of the balmy temperature and complicated conveniences of Faxon’s bedroom, the injunction was not easy to obey.  It was wonderful luck to have found a night’s shelter under the opulent roof of Overdale, and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the full.  But the place, for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly cold and unwelcoming.  He couldn’t have said why, and could only suppose that Mr. Lavington’s intense personality—­intensely negative, but intense all the same—­must, in some occult way, have penetrated every corner of his dwelling.  Perhaps, though, it was merely that Faxon himself was tired and hungry, more deeply chilled than he had known till he came in from the cold, and unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the prospect of perpetually treading other people’s stairs.

“I hope you’re not famished?” Rainer’s slim figure was in the doorway.  “My uncle has a little business to attend to with Mr. Grisben, and we don’t dine for half an hour.  Shall I fetch you, or can you find your way down?  Come straight to the dining room—­the second door on the left of the long gallery.”