“I’ll go and see if Mr. Bob has come in,” she said. “Will you take a chair, sir?”

She went off, and Wolf sat down obediently. The place was certainly the coldest, the most cheerless, the most forbidding entrance-hall he had ever waited in. “I prefer the Mrs. Torp kind of house to this!” he thought, as he fidgeted upon his glacial chair and shifted his shoulders to avoid its pseudo-antique mouldings.

Wearily he fixed a lacklustre eye upon a heavy marble slab that stood opposite him, supported by carved alabaster columns. “I suppose,” he thought savagely, as he struggled against a wave of overpowering gloom, “I suppose Bob Weevil hardly extends his interest in ladies’ legs to alabaster sphinxes!”