death, and she had been borne senseless from his chamber to her own,
Brandon walked with a step far different from his usual stately gait to
the room where his brother lay. It was one of the oldest apartments in
the house, and much of the ancient splendour that belonged to the mansion
ere its size had been reduced, with the fortunes of its successive
owners, still distinguished the chamber. The huge mantelpiece ascending
to the carved ceiling in grotesque pilasters, and scroll-work of the
blackest oak, with the quartered arms of Brandon and Saville escutcheoned
in the centre; the panelled walls of the same dark wainscot; the armorie
of ebony; the high-backed chairs, with their tapestried seats; the lofty
bed, with its hearse-like plumes and draperies of a crimson damask that
seemed, so massy was the substance and so prominent the flowers, as if it
were rather a carving than a silk,--all conspired with the size of the
room to give it a feudal solemnity, not perhaps suited to the rest of the
house, but well calculated to strike a gloomy awe into the breast of the
worldly and proud man who now entered the death-chamber of his brother.

Silently William Brandon motioned away the attendants, and silently he
seated himself by the bed, and looked long and wistfully upon the calm
and placid face of the deceased. It is difficult to guess at what passed
within him during the space of time in which he remained alone in that
room. The apartment itself he could not at another period have tenanted
without secret emotion. It was that in which, as a boy, he had himself
been accustomed to sleep; and, even then a schemer and an aspirant, the
very sight of the room sufficed to call back all the hopes and visions,
the restless projects and the feverish desires, which had now brought him
to the envied state of an acknowledged celebrity and a shattered frame.
There must have been something awful in the combination of those active
remembrances with the cause which had led him to that apartment; and
there was a homily in the serene countenance of the dead, which preached