Richard Jeffray thrust back his chair from Sir Peter Hardacre's dining - table, and stood stiff and ill at ease, like a man but half sure of his own dignity. The Dutch clock had struck three, and the winter sunlight was still flooding through the tall windows upon the polished floor. A log-fire blazed on the irons; decanters and glasses glistened on the table about a great china punch-bowl covered with green dragons and blue mandarins.<br><br>It was early in the afternoon, and yet Parson Jessel's great wig was flapping forward with an unsaintly tilt over the pastor's left eye. Sir Peter, a fat and tuberose-nosed aristocrat, in a blue coat and a brocaded waistcoat, sprawled in his arm-chair at the end of the table, his paunch abutting against the board, his full-bottomed wig flowing in slovenly profusion about his blotchy face. On the far side of the table, with his back to the fire, sat Mr. Lot Hardacre, a heavy-shouldered gentleman in a scarlet hunting-coat and buckskin breeches, whose culture was half that of a jockey, half that of a card-sharper. A long clay pipe drooped from the angle of Mr. Lot Hardacre's mouth, and his coarse, chapped hands were stuffed into the pockets of his breeches.