The light was bad, for the two windows were partially shuttered, but it had plainly been a smoking-room, for there were pipe-racks by the hearth, and on the walls a number of old school and college photographs, a couple of oars with emblazoned names, and a variety of stags' and roebucks' heads.

There was no fire in the grate, but a small oil-stove burned inside the fender.

In a stiff-backed chair sat an elderly woman, who seemed to feel the cold, for she was muffled to the neck in a fur coat.

Beside her, so that the late afternoon light caught her face and head, stood a girl.
Dickson's first impression was of a tall child.

The pose, startled and wild and yet curiously stiff and self-conscious, was that of a child striving to remember a forgotten lesson.