visitor's appearance with the removal of the muddy coat and cap.

Richard Kendrick now looked a particularly personable young man, well
built, well dressed, of the brown-haired, gray-eyed, clear-skinned type.
The eyes were very fine; the nose and mouth had the lines of
distinction; the chin was--positive. Altogether the young man did not
look the part he had that day been playing--that of the rich young idler
who drives a hundred and fifty miles in a powerful car, over the worst
kind of roads, merely for the sake of diversion and a good luncheon.

While he waited Richard considered the hall, at one end of which he sat
in the shadow. There was something very homelike about this hall. The
quaint landscape paper on the walls, the perceptibly worn and faded
crimson Turkey carpeting on the floors, the wide, spindle-balustrade
staircase with the old clock on its landing; more than all, perhaps, on
an October night like this, the warm glow from a lamp with crystal
pendants which stood on the table of polished mahogany near the front
door--all these things combined to give the place a quite distinctive
look of home.

There were one or two other touches in the picture worth mentioning, the
touches which spoke of human life. An old-fashioned hat-tree just
opposite the rear door was hung full with hats. A heavy ulster lay over
a chair close by, and two umbrellas stood in the corner. And over
hat-rack, hats, ulster, and chair, with one end of silken fringe caught
upon one of the umbrella ribs, had been flung by some careless hand,
presumably feminine, a long silken scarf of the most intense
rose-colour, a hue so vivid, as the light caught it from the landing
above, that it seemed almost to be alive.