nd in front of it a straight-backed chair adorned with the
grotesque carving of an ancient and long-dead fashion. About him,
everywhere, were the evidences of luxury and of age. The big lamp,
which gave a brilliant light, was of hammered brass; the base of its
square pedestal was partly hidden in the rumples of a heavy damask
spread which covered the table on which it rested. The table itself was
old, spindle-legged, glowing with the mellow luster endowed by many
passing generations--a relic of the days when the originator of its
fashion became the favorite of a capricious and beautiful queen. Soft
rugs were upon the floor; from the walls, papered and hung with odd
bits of tapestry, strange faces looked down upon Philip from out of
heavy gilded frames; faces grim, pale, shadowed; men with plaited
ruffles and curls; women with powdered hair, who gazed down upon him
haughtily, as if they wondered at his intrusion.

One picture was turned with its face to the wall.

Philip sank into a huge arm-chair, cushioned with velvet, and dropped
his cap upon the floor. And this was Fort o' God! He scarcely breathed.
He was back two centuries, and he stared, as if each moment he expected
some manifestation of life in what he saw. He had dreamed his dream
over the dead at Churchill; here it was reality--almost; it lacked but
a breath, a movement, a flutter of life in the dead faces that looked
down upon him. He gazed up at them again, and laughed a little
nervously. Then he fixed his eyes on the opposite wall. One of the
pictures was moving. The thought in his brain had given birth to the
movement he had imagined. It was a woman's face in the picture, young
and beautiful, and it nodded to him, one moment radiant with light, the
next caught in shadows that cast over it a gloom. He jumped from his
chair and went so that he stood directly under it.

A current of warm air shot up into his face from the floor. It was this
air that was causing movement in the picture, and he looked down. What
he discovered broke the spell he was under. About him were the relics
of age, of a life long dead. Rubens might have sat in that room, and
mourned over his handiwork, lost in a wilderness. The stingy Louis
might have recognized in the spindle-legged table a bit of his
predecessor's extravagance, which he had sold for the good of the
exchequer of France; a Gobelin might have reclaimed one of the woven
landscapes on the wall, a Grosellier himself have i