Haward nodded, and taking the candle began to mount the stairs. Half way
up he found that the man in the sad-colored raiment was following him. He
raised his brows, but being in a taciturn humor, and having, moreover, to
shield the flame from the wind that drove down the stair, he said nothing,
going on in silence to the landing, and to the great eastward-facing room
that had been his father's, and which now he meant to make his own. There
were candles on the table, the dresser, and the mantelshelf. He lit them
all, and the room changed from a place of shadows and monstrous shapes to
a gentleman's bedchamber,--somewhat sparsely furnished, but of a
comfortable and cheerful aspect. A cloth lay upon the floor, the windows
were curtained, and the bed had fresh hangings of green and white
Kidderminster. Over the mantel hung a painting of Haward and his mother,
done when he was six years old. Beneath the laughing child and the smiling
lady, young and flower-crowned, were crossed two ancient swords. In the
middle of the room stood a heavy table, and pushed back, as though some
one had lately risen from it, was an armchair of Russian leather. Books
lay upon the table; one of them open, with a horn snuffbox keeping down
the leaf.

Haward seated himself in the great chair, and looked around him with a
thoughtful and melancholy smile. He could not clearly remember his mother.
The rings upon her fingers and her silvery laughter were all that dwelt in
his mind, and now only the sound of that merriment floated back to him and
lingered in the room. But his father had died upon that bed, and beside
the dead man, between the candles at the head and the candles at the foot,
he had sat the night through. The curtains were half drawn, and in their
shadow his imagination laid again that cold, inanimate form. Twelve years
ago! How young he had been that night, and how old he had thought himself
as he watched beside the dead, chilled by the cold of the crossed hands,