tored the house, and then
died, enormously old. This explains why it is all so new."

The old Spanish sorcerer to whom Mlle. de Tartas had left her personal
property had done his work thoroughly. The house was absolutely empty,
even the wardrobes and bookcases built in had been carried away; we went
through room after room, finding all absolutely dismantled, only the
windows and doors with their casings, the parquet floors, and the florid
Renaissance mantels remaining.

"I feel better," remarked Fargeau. "The house may be haunted, but it
don't look it, certainly; it is the most respectable place imaginable."

"Just you wait," replied Eugene. "These are only the state apartments,
which my aunt seldom used, except, perhaps, on her annual
'Walpurgisnacht.' Come up stairs and I will show you a better _mise en
scene_."

On this floor, the rooms fronting the court, the sleeping-rooms, were
quite small,--("They are the bad rooms all the same," said
Eugene,)--four of them, all just as ordinary in appearance as those
below. A corridor ran behind them connecting with the wing corridor,
and from this opened a door, unlike any of the other doors in that it
was covered with green baize, somewhat moth-eaten. Eugene selected a key
from the bunch he carried, unlocked the door, and with some difficulty
forced it to swing inward; it was as heavy as the door of a safe.

"We are now," he said, "on the very threshold of hell itself; these
rooms in here were my scarlet aunt's unholy of unholies. I never let
them with the rest of the house, but keep them as a curiosity. I only
wish Torrevieja had kept out; as it was, he looted them, as he did the
rest of the house, and nothing is left but the walls and ceiling and
floor. They are something, however, and may suggest what the former
condition must have been. Tremble and enter."

The first apartment was a kind of anteroom, a cube of perhaps twenty
feet each way, without windows, and with no doors except that by which
we entered and another to the right. Walls, floor, and ceiling were
covered with a black lacquer, brilliantly polished, that flashed the
light of our lanterns in a thousand intricate reflections. It was like
the inside of an enormous Japanese box, and about as empty. From this
we passed to another room, and here we nearly dropped our lanterns. The
room was circular, thirty feet or so in diameter, covered by a
hemispherical dome; walls and ceiling were dark blue, spotted with g