dust, fastened with pins on to the wall on each side of the high mantle-piece; even a book, a railway novel, with its yellow boards gnawed by the rats, which she picked up rather timorously from the floor, where, by this time, it seemed to have acquired a consecrated right to lie.

Still advancing very slowly, Olivia reached the opposite side of the room, where her quick eyes had perceived the barred shutters of a second and much larger window. With some difficulty she removed the bar, which had grown stiff and rusty, and, drawing back the heavy shutters, revealed the long, stone-mullioned window, with diamond panes, which had been such a picturesque feature of the house from the outside. The thick, untrained ivy obscured one end of it, but enough light glimmered through the dirt-encrusted panes for Olivia to be now quite sure of two things of which she felt nearly sure before—namely, that this was the best bedroom in the house, and that, for some mysterious reason, this chamber, instead of being dismantled like the rest, had been allowed to remain for a period of years almost as its last occupant had left it. Almost, but not quite; for the bedding had been removed, the covers to the dressing-table and the gigantic chest of drawers, and the white curtains which had once hung before the shuttered window.

On the other hand, a host of knicknacks remained to testify to the sex, the approximate age, and the measure of refinement of the late owner. More railway novels, all well-worn; flower vases of an inexpensive kind; two hand mirrors, one broken; a dream book; a bow of bright ribbon; a handsome cut-glass scent bottle; these things, among others, were as suggestive as a photograph; while the fact that this room alone had been studiously left in its original[Pg 14] state, and even furnished in accordance with it, threw a new and more favorable light on the taste of that mysteriously interesting somebody whose individuality made itself felt across a lapse of years to the wondering new comer.

[Pg 14]

Olivia Denison was not by any means a fanciful girl. She had been brought up by a step-mother—a mode of education little likely to produce an unwholesome forcing of the sentimental tendencies. She was besides too athletic and vigorously healthy to be prone to superstitious or morbid imaginings. But as she stood straining her eyes in the fading daylight to take in every detail of the mysterious room, the panelling, which in this apartment alone was left its own dark color, seemed to take strange moving patterns as she looked; the musty, close air seemed to choke her; and faint creakings and moanings, either in the ancient woodwork or the 

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