I found myself in a large, lofty room, with a magnificent carved ceiling, and with a carpet over the floor, so thick and soft that it felt like piles of velvet under my feet.  One side of the room was occupied by a long bookcase of some rare inlaid wood that was quite new to me.  It was not more than six feet high, and the top was adorned with statuettes in marble, ranged at regular distances one from the other.  On the opposite side stood two antique cabinets; and between them, and above them, hung a picture of the Virgin and Child, protected by glass, and bearing Raphael’s name on the gilt tablet at the bottom of the frame.  On my right hand and on my left, as I stood inside the door, were chiffoniers and little stands in buhl and marquetterie, loaded with figures in Dresden china, with rare vases, ivory ornaments, and toys and curiosities that sparkled at all points with gold, silver, and precious stones.  At the lower end of the room, opposite to me, the windows were concealed and the sunlight was tempered by large blinds of the same pale sea-green colour as the curtains over the door.  The light thus produced was deliciously soft, mysterious, and subdued; it fell equally upon all the objects in the room; it helped to intensify the deep silence, and the air of profound seclusion that possessed the place; and it surrounded, with an appropriate halo of repose, the solitary figure of the master of the house, leaning back, listlessly composed, in a large easy-chair, with a reading-easel fastened on one of its arms, and a little table on the other.

If a man’s personal appearance, when he is out of his dressing-room, and when he has passed forty, can be accepted as a safe guide to his time of life—­which is more than doubtful—­Mr. Fairlie’s age, when I saw him, might have been reasonably computed at over fifty and under sixty years.  His beardless face was thin, worn, and transparently pale, but not wrinkled; his nose was high and hooked; his eyes were of a dim greyish blue, large, prominent, and rather red round the rims of the eyelids; his hair was scanty, soft to look at, and of that light sandy colour which is the last to disclose its own changes towards grey.  He was dressed in a dark frock-coat, of some substance much thinner than cloth, and in waistcoat and trousers of spotless white.  His feet were effeminately small, and were clad in buff-coloured silk stockings, and little womanish bronze-leather slippers.  Two rings adorned his white delicate hands, the value of which even my inexperienced observation detected to be all but priceless.  Upon the whole, he had a frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined look—­something singularly and unpleasantly delicate in its association with a man, and, at the same time, something which could by no possibility have looked natural and appropriate if it had been transferred to the personal appearance of a woman.  My morning’s experience of Miss Halcombe had predisposed me to be pleased with everybody in the house; but my sympathies shut themselves up resolutely at the first sight of Mr. Fairlie.