health and strength.

"I suppose you are a great sportsman?" I asked from sheer despair, nodding
in the direction of the whips and guns and fishing-rods.

"Oh no! not now. I was once. I have given up all that," he answered,
standing with his back to the fire, and staring at the polar bear beneath
his feet. "I--I have no time for all that now," he added, as if an
explanation were due. "A married man--you know. Would you like to come up
to your rooms?" he suddenly interrupted himself. "I have had one arranged
for you to paint in. My wife said you would prefer a north light. If that
one doesn't suit, you can have your choice of any other."

I followed him out of the study, through the vast entrance-hall. In less
than a minute I was no longer thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Oke and the boredom
of doing their likeness; I was simply overcome by the beauty of this house,
which I had pictured modern and philistine. It was, without exception, the
most perfect example of an old English manor-house that I had ever seen;
the most magnificent intrinsically, and the most admirably preserved. Out
of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved and
inlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reaching
from the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship's
hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted at
intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of
coats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded red
and blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with the
tarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oak
cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded. The beautifully damascened
suits of court armour looked, without being at all rusty, as if no modern
hand had ever touched them; the very rugs under foot were of