So much may lie behind a tightly closed door! But my
hesitation, if hesitation it was, lasted but a moment. My natural
impatience and the promptings of my vanity overcame the dictates
of my judgment, and, reckless of consequences, perhaps disdainful
of them, I soon had the knob in my grasp. I gave a slight push to
the door and, on seeing a crack of light leap into life along the
jamb, pushed the door wider and wider till the whole room stood
revealed.
The instantaneous banging of a shutter in one of its windows proved
the room to be the very one which we had seen lighted from below.
Otherwise all was still; nor was I able to detect, in my first
hurried glance, any other token of human presence than a candle
sputtering in its own grease at the bottom of a tumbler placed on
one corner of, an old-fashioned dressing table. This, the one
touch of incongruity in a room otherwise rich if not stately in
its appointments, was loud in its suggestion of some hidden
presence given to expedients and reckless of consequences; but of
this presence nothing was to be seen.
Not satisfied with this short survey,-a survey which had given me
the impression of a spacious old-fashioned chamber, fully furnished
but breathing of the by-gone rather than of the present - and
resolved to know the worst, or, rather, to dare the worst and be
done with it, I strode straight into the center of the room and
cast about me quickly a comprehensive glance which spared nothing,
not even the shadows lurking in the corners.
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