The Long Portage by Harold Bindloss

It was late at night, but Gladwyne sat, cigar in hand, in his library, while Batley lounged beside the hearth. A wood fire diffused a faint aromatic fragrance into the great high-ceilinged room, and the light of a single silver lamp flickered on the polished floor, which ran back like a sheet of black ice into the shadow. Heavily-corniced bookcases rose above it on either band, conveying an idea of space and distance by the way they grew dimmer as they receded from the light.

The room had an air of stateliness in its severe simplicity, and its owner, sitting just inside the ring of brightness, clad in conventional black and white, looked in harmony with it. Something in his finely-lined figure and cleanly-molded face stamped him as one at home in such a place. A decanter stood near his elbow, but it was almost full. Gladwyne, in many ways, was more of an ascetic than a sensualist, though this was less the result of moral convictions than of a fastidious temperament. The man had an instinctive aversion for anything that was ugly or unpleasant. His companion, dressed with an equal precision, looked different, more virile, coarser; he was fuller in figure and heavier in face.