at having you here is shorn of
its keenness by a long-established age that demands house-boots, an eider-
down coat and--Murray, what the devil do you mean by letting the house get
so cold as all this? It's like a barn. Are the furnaces out. What am I
paying that rascally O'Toole for? Tell him to--"

"It is quite comfortable, Mr. Thorpe," said Anne, with a slight shiver
that was not to be charged to the defective O'Toole.

The long, wide hall was dark and grim. Wade was dark and grim, and Murray
too, despite his rotundity. There were lank shadows at the bottom of the
hall, grim projections of objects that stood for ornamentation: a suit of
armour, a gloomy candlestick of prodigious stature, and a thin Italian
cabinet surmounted by an urn whose unexposed contents might readily have
suggested something more sinister than the dust of antiquity. The door to
the library was open. Fitful red shadows flashed dully from the fireplace
across the room, creeping out into the hall and then darting back again as
if afraid to venture. The waning sunlight struggled through a curtained
window at the top of the stairs. There was dusk in the house. Evening had
fallen there.

Anne stood in the middle of the library, divested of her warm fur coat.
Murray was poking the fire, and cheerful flames were leaping upward in
response to the call to wake. She had removed one of her gloves. With the
slim, bared fingers she fondled the pearls about her neck, but her
thoughts were not of baubles. She was thinking of this huge room full of
shadows, shadows through which she would have to walk for many a day,
where night would always be welcome because of the light it demanded.

It was a man's room. Everything in it was massive, substantial. Big
chairs, wide lounges, and a thick soft carpet of dull red that deprived
the footfall of its sound. Books mounted high,--almost to the
ceiling,--filling all the spaces left unused by the doors and windows.
Heavy damask curtains shut out the light of day. She wondered why they had
been drawn so early, and whether they were always drawn like this. Near
the big fireplace, with its long mantelpiece over which hung suspended the
portrait of an early Knickerbocker gentleman with ruddy, even convivial
countenance, stood a long table, a reading lamp at the farther end. Books,
magazines, papers lay in disorder upon this table.

She recalled something that Braden once had told her: his grandfather
always "raised Cain"