“We are referring to the inns in this neighbourhood where my son meets his friends,” remarked the mother; and Wolf, contemplating the thin, peaked face, the smooth, high forehead, the neatly brushed pale hair, the nun-like dress of the little woman, felt ashamed of the first rush of inconsiderate contempt that her manner of speech had provoked in him.

“There’s something funny about all this,” he thought to himself. “I’ll be interested to see this confounded incense-burner.”

Left to himself to unpack his things, he looked round with anxious concern at the room that was to be his base of operations, his secret fox’s hole, for so prolonged a time. There was a Leighton over the mantelpiece, and a huge Alma-Tadema between the two windows; and he divined at once that the spare-bedroom was used as a depository by this household for mid-Victorian works of art.