sked.

He sat down, and she left him; when her footsteps had died away, and he
could hear no other sounds except the occasional soft tread of some
servant, he twisted himself about in his chair and looked around. A
door between the room he was in and the large room which had been upon
his right as they came in--a drawing-room--stood open; he could see
into the drawing-room, and he could see through the other door a
portion of the hall; his inspection of these increased the bewilderment
he felt. Who were these Sherrills? Who was Corvet, and what was his
relation to the Sherrills? What, beyond all, was their and Corvet's
relation to Alan Conrad--to himself? The shock and confusion he had
felt at the nature of his reception in Corvet's house, and the
strangeness of his transition from his little Kansas town to a place
and people such as this, had prevented him from inquiring directly from
Constance Sherrill as to that; and, on her part, she had assumed,
plainly, that he already knew and need not be told.

He got up and moved about the rooms; they, like all rooms, must tell
something about the people who lived in them. The rooms were large and
open; Alan, in dreaming and fancying to himself the places to which he
might some day be summoned, had never dreamed of entering such a home
as this. For it was a home; in its light and in its furnishings there
was nothing of the stiffness and aloofness which Alan, never having
seen such rooms except in pictures, had imagined to be necessary evils
accompanying riches and luxury; it was not the richness of its
furnishings that impressed him first, it was its livableness. Among
the more modern pieces in the drawing-room and hall were some which
were antique. In the part of the hall that he could see, a black and
ancient-looking chair whose lines he recognized, stood against the
wall. He had seen chairs like that, heirlooms of colonial
Massachusetts or Connecticut, cherished in Kansas farmhouses and
recalling some long-past exodus of the family from New England. On the
wall of the drawing-room, among the beautiful and elusive paintings and
etchings, was a picture of a ship, plainly framed; he moved closer to
look at it, but he did not know what kind of ship it was except that it
was a sailing ship of some long-disused design. Then he drew back
again into the smaller room where he had been left, and sat down again
to wait.

A comfortable fire of cannel coal was burning in t