but I feel that it is a law and not an impulse. I am led
blindly forward, but I go unresistingly, feeling that there is no power
left in me save that of obeying.

Did I push open the door of the secret room, or was it opened for me by
unseen hands? I know not. I only know that it closed noiselessly behind
me of its own accord and left me standing there wondering, alone, with
white face and staring eyes.

The chamber was a large one, or seemed so to me. It was draped entirely
in black, hiding whatever windows there might be. The polished wood
floor was bare. The ceiling was painted with a number of sprawling
Cupids, some of them scattering flowers, others weaving leafy chaplets,
presumably to crown the inane-looking goddess reclining in their midst
on a bank of impossible cloud. But both Cupids and goddess were dingy
with age, and seemed to have grown too old for such Arcadian revels.

The room was lighted with a dozen large wax candles placed in four
silver tripods, each of them about six feet in height, and screwed to
the floor to prevent their being overturned. All these preparations were
not without an object. That object was visible in the middle of the
room. It was a large black coffin studded with silver nails, placed on a
black slab about four feet in height, and more than half covered with a
large pall.

I felt no fear at sight of this grim object. I was lifted too far above
my ordinary self to be afraid. I simply wondered--wondered who lay
asleep inside the coffin, and how long he or she had been there.

The only article of furniture in the room was a _prie-dieu_ of black
oak. I knelt on this, and gazed on the coffin, and wondered. My
curiosity urged me to go up to it, and turn down the pall, and ascertain
whether the name of the occupant was engraved on the lid. But stronger
than my curiosity was a certain repugnance to go near it which I could
not overcome. That some person was shut up there who during life had
been of importance in the world, I could not doubt. This, too, was the
room in which Lady Chillington took her midnight perambulations, and
that coffin was the object she came to contemplate. Perhaps the occupant
of the coffin came out, and walked with my lady, and held ghostly
converse with her on such occasions. I fancied that even now I could
hear him breathing heavily, and turning over uneasily in his narrow bed.
There seemed a rustling, too, among the folds of the sombre curtains as
though so