linger here long, but, taking a key from a drawer, continued up the
staircase, to the ominous funeral marches of the beating rain on
the skylight, and paused on the landing to glance into his son's
and daughter's bedrooms, duplicates of the bizarre extravagance
below. If he were seeking some characteristic traces of his absent
family, they certainly were not here in the painted and still damp
blazoning of their later successes. He ascended another staircase,
and, passing to the wing of the house, paused before a small door,
which was locked. Already the ostentatious decorations of wall and
passages were left behind, and the plain lath-and-plaster partition
of the attic lay before him. He unlocked the door, and threw it
open.


CHAPTER V


The apartment he entered was really only a lumber-room or loft over
the wing of the house, which had been left bare and unfinished, and
which revealed in its meagre skeleton of beams and joints the
hollow sham of the whole structure. But in more violent contrast
to the fresher glories of the other part of the house were its
contents, which were the heterogeneous collection of old furniture,
old luggage, and cast-off clothing, left over from the past life in
the old cabin. It was a much plainer record of the simple
beginnings of the family than Mrs. Mulrady cared to have remain in
evidence, and for that reason it had been relegated to the hidden
recesses of the new house, in the hope that it might absorb or
digest it. There were old cribs, in which the infant limbs of
Mamie and Abner had been tucked up; old looking-glasses, that had