uriosities 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.

On approaching nearer to him, I discovered that he was not so entirely
without occupation as I had at first supposed. Placed amid the other
rare and beautiful objects on a large round table near him, was a dwarf