arrival at North Villa, I was shown into what I presumed was the
drawing-room.

Everything was oppressively new. The brilliantly-varnished door cracked
with a report like a pistol when it was opened; the paper on the walls,
with its gaudy pattern of birds, trellis-work, and flowers, in gold,
red, and green on a white ground, looked hardly dry yet; the showy
window-curtains of white and sky-blue, and the still showier carpet of
red and yellow, seemed as if they had come out of the shop yesterday;
the round rosewood table was in a painfully high state of polish; the
morocco-bound picture books that lay on it, looked as if they had never
been moved or opened since they had been bought; not one leaf even
of the music on the piano was dogs-eared or worn. Never was a richly
furnished room more thoroughly comfortless than this--the eye ached at
looking round it. There was no repose anywhere. The print of the Queen,
hanging lonely on the wall, in its heavy gilt frame, with a large crown
at the top, glared on you: the paper, the curtains, the carpet glared
on you: the books, the wax-flowers in glass-cases, the chairs in flaring
chintz-covers, the china plates on the door, the blue and pink glass
vases and cups ranged on the chimney-piece, the over-ornamented
chiffoniers with Tonbridge toys and long-necked smelling bottles on
their upper shelves--all glared on you. There was no look of shadow,
shelter, secrecy, or retirement in any one nook or corner of those four
gaudy walls. All surrounding objects seemed startlingly near to the eye;
much nearer than they really were. The room would have given a nervous
man the headache, before he had been in it a quarter of an hour.

I was not kept waiting long. Another violent crack from the new door,
announced the entrance of Mr. Sherwin himself.

He was a tall, thin man: rather round-shouldered; weak at the knees, and
trying to conceal the weakness in the breadth of his trowsers. He wore
a white cravat, and an absurdly high shirt collar. His complexion
was sallow; his eyes were small, black, bright, and incessantly in
motion--indeed, all his features were singularly mobile: they were
affected by nervous contractions and spasms which were constantly
drawing up and down in all directions the brow, the mouth, and the
muscles of the cheek. His hair had been black, but was now turning to a
sort of iron-grey; it was very dry, wiry, and plentiful, and part of
it projected almost horizontally ov