Mr. Urquhart smiled and leant back in his chair. He drained his wine-cup to the dregs, and with half-shut malignant eyes, full of a strange inward unction, he squinnied at his interlocutor. The lines of his face, as he sat there contemplating his imaginary History, took to themselves the emphatic dignity of a picture by Holbein. The parchment-like skin stretched itself tightly and firmly round the bony structure of the cheeks, as though it had been vellum over a mysterious folio. A veil of almost sacerdotal cunning hovered, like a drooping gonfalon, over the man’s heavy eyelids and the loose wrinkles that gathered beneath his eyes. What still puzzled Wolf more than anything else was the youthful glossiness of his host’s hair, which contrasted very oddly not only with the extreme pallor of his flesh, but also with the deeply indented contours of his Holbein-like countenance. Mr. Urquhart’s coiffure seemed, in fact, an obtrusive and unnatural ornament designed to set off quite a different type of face from the one it actually surmounted.