end, crossed a small circular upper hall, and
stopped in front of a door covered with dark
baize. The servant opened this door, and led
me on a few yards to a second; opened that
also, and disclosed two curtains of pale sea-green
silk hanging before us; raised one of them
noiselessly; softly uttered the words, "Mr.
Hartright," and left me.

I found myself in a large, lofty room, with a
magnificent carved ceiling, and with a carpet
over the floor, so thick and soft that it felt like
piles of velvet under my feet. One side of the
room was occupied by a long bookcase of some
rare inlaid wood that was quite new to me. It
was not more than six feet high, and the top
was adorned with statuettes in marble, ranged
at regular distances one from the other. On
the opposite side stood two antique cabinets;
and between them, and above them, hung a
picture of the Virgin and Child, protected by
glass, and bearing Raphael's name on the gilt
tablet at the bottom of the frame. On my right
hand and on my left, as I stood inside the door,
were chiffoniers and little stands in buhl and
marquetterie, loaded with figures in Dresden
china, with rare vases, ivory ornaments, and toys
and curiosities 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 cabinet in ebony and
silver, containing coins of all shapes and sizes,
set out in little drawers lined with dark purple
velvet. One of these drawers lay on the small
table attached to his chair; and near it were
some tiny jewellers' brushes, a washleather
"stump", and a little bottle of liquid, all waiting
to be used in various ways for the removal
of any accidental impurities which might be
discovered on the coins. His frail white fingers
were listlessly toying with something which
looked, to my uninstructed eyes, like a dirty
pewter medal with ragged edges, when I
advanced within a respectful distance of his chair,
and stopped to make my bow.

"So glad to possess you at Limmeridge, Mr.
Hartright," he said, in a querulous, croaking
voice, which combined, in anything but an
agreeable manner, a discordantly high tone with a
drowsily languid utterance.  "Pray sit down.
And don't trouble yourself to move the chair,
please. In the wretched state of my nerves,
movement of any kind is exquisitely painful to
me. Have you seen your studio? Will it do?"

"I have just come from seeing the room, Mr.
Fairlie; and I assure you——"

He stopped me in the middle of the sentence,
by closing his eyes, and holding up one of his
white hands imploringly. I paused in astonishment;
and the croaking voice honoured me with
this explanation:

"Pray excuse me. But could you contrive to
speak in a lower key? In the wretched state of
my nerves, loud sound of any kind is indescribable
torture to me.  You will pardon an invalid?
I only say to you what the lamentable state of
my health obliges me to say to everybody.  Yes.
And you really like the room?"

"I could wish for nothing prettier and
nothing more comfortable," I answered, dropping
my voice, and beginning to discover already
that Mr. Fairlie's selfish affectation and Mr.
Fairlie's wretched nerves meant one and the
same thing.

"So glad.  You will find your position here,
Mr. Hartright, properly recognised. There is
none of the horrid English barbarity of feeling
about the social position of an artist, in this house.
So much of my early life has been passed abroad,
that I have quite cast my insular skin in that
respect. I wish I could say the same of the
gentry—detestable word, but I suppose I must
use it—of the gentry in the neighbourhood. They
are sad Goths in Art, Mr. Hartright.  People,
I do assure you, who would have opened
their eyes in astonishment, if they had seen