principal rooms with graceful decoration, than the man who built it died.
His descendants, who had plenty of houses in more southern and populous
regions, turned their backs upon the Tower, refused to live in it, and,
failing to find a tenant of the gentry class, let part of it to the
farmer, and put in a gardener as caretaker. Yet a certain small sum had
always been allowed for keeping it in repair, and it was only within the
last few years that dilapidation had made head.

Melrose took up the lamp, and carried it once more through the
ground-floor of the Tower. Save for the dying fires, and the sputtering
lamp, everything was dark and still in the spacious house. The storm was
dying down in fitful gusts that seemed at intervals to invade the shadowy
spaces of the corridor, driving before them the wisps of straw and paper
that had been left here and there by the unpacking of the great
writing-table. There could be no ghosts in the house, for nothing but a
fraction of it had ever sheltered life; yet from its architectural
beauty there breathed a kind of dumb, human protest against the
disorderly ill-treatment to which it had been subjected.

In spite of his excitement and pre-occupation, Melrose felt it, and
presently he turned abruptly, and went upstairs, still carrying the lamp;
through the broad upper passage answering to the corridor below, where
doors in deep recesses, each with its classical architrave, and its
carved lintels, opened from either side. The farthest door on the right
he had been shown as that of his wife's room; he opened one nearer, and
let himself into his dressing-room, where Anastasia had taken care to
light the fire, which no north country-woman would have thought of
lighting for a mere man.

Putting the lamp down in the dressing-room, he pushed open his wife's